F365 – Reds progress delights Werner

Liverpool chairman Tom Werner claims manager Brendan Rodgers has made “remarkable progress” during his first year in charge.

A news article on 2013-05-24 09:30:00 from: Football 365

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TI – Liverpool chairman happy with ‘remarkable progress’ being made under Brendan Rodgers

Liverpool chairman Tom Werner claims manager Brendan Rodgers has made “remarkable progress” during his first year in charge.

A news article on 2013-05-24 09:19:00 from: The Independent

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STAR: Liverpool and Arsenal alerted by Mauricio Isla comments

LIVERPOOL and Arsenal may be tempted to rekindle their interest in Juventus midfielder Mauricio Isla.

A news article on 2013-05-22 11:50:00 from: The Daily Star

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GUARDIAN – Brendan Rodgers says consistency is key to Liverpool top-four ambition

• Manager leads side to one place higher than under Dalglish
• ‘This year has provided a great learning curve for me’

Brendan Rodgers has described his debut season as Liverpool manager as a necessary learning curve that can produce a top-four challenge next term providing the team’s consistency and mentality improves.

The Liverpool manager has delivered a seventh-placed finish in the Premier League, one place higher than Kenny Dalglish achieved last year albeit without winning the League Cup and having spent almost £50m on new players. The first half of the campaign suffered from the calamitous end to last summer’s transfer window, when Liverpool’s new recruitment team were on gardening leaving following their departures from Manchester City, and Rodgers insists lessons have been learned throughout his debut season.

“This year has provided a great learning curve for me and I look back and see that it was learning that I needed,” he said. “I knew the expectancy of the club but, going into next season, I am a much better prepared manager for that. We want to make significant improvements next year in the points total because the reality is we are 30 points behind the leaders and 11 points behind the top four.

“But I’ve seen enough and if we improve our mentality in the summer – by signing players who have that consistent winning mentality – we can then improve again, like we have done in the second half of the season. That’s the job of the recruitment team and the club to identify those types of players. They might not always be the best players but what we need in the second year of this project is to find a great level of consistency.”

Liverpool are five points behind Everton in sixth ahead of their final game of the season at home to Queens Park Rangers on Sunday, when Jamie Carragher will make his final appearance for the club, but Rodgers insists “small steps” forward have been taken.

The Liverpool manager added: “There is a process of getting into the top four and becoming champions and that is consistency. This club didn’t win two league games in a row for over a year. That came earlier on in the season and when you step back and look at that, it is nowhere near good enough if you are going to succeed.

“You build a mentality in your group and you get the types of players who can be on it every single game. I’ve loved every minute of being here and the small steps of where we want to go. But now I want to make bigger steps.”


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A news article on 2013-05-14 13:59:00 from: The Guardian

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GUARDIAN – Philippe Coutinho’s skills promise resurgence for Liverpool powerhouse | Louise Taylor

Dominant teams of the 1980s produce flashes of highest quality which suggest gap to Manchester and London leaders can close

Bright spring sunshine bathed England’s third football city in a warm, distinctly flattering light on Sunday. It was the sort of afternoon when the hurt involved in Liverpool falling behind Manchester and London in the domestic game’s pecking order could be, albeit temporarily, forgotten.

As a string of 1980s pop hits boomed out of the Anfield sound system before kick-off, the clock seemed to rewind to a time when Liverpool and Everton were the pre-eminent football forces in the land.

Once the game actually kicked off that notion was swiftly dismissed – and yet amid much typical derby scrapping there were some moments of class that belonged at the Premier League’s top table.

Regardless of the little detail that Everton are poised to finish above their neighbours from across Stanley Park for a second successive season, most such cameos came from Liverpool and Philippe Coutinho in particular.

If the 20-year-old Brazilian midfielder’s marker-deceiving turns, inventive passes and incisive movement explained why Southampton’s Mauricio Pochettino – Coutinho’s coach at Espanyol – described Rodgers’s January import from Internazionale as a hybrid of Lionel Messi and Ronaldinho, he also served as a reminder of two things.

Firstly, although Jamie Carragher’s final derby before retirement may have marked the end of a sporadically glorious Anfield era, sufficient talent remains to ensure that Manchester and London are unlikely to regard Merseyside with pity more than fear indefinitely. Secondly, Brendan Rodgers owes a considerable debt to Rafael Benítez.

Liverpool’s manager seems a little wary of the Spaniard who once occupied his office with distinction, yet Benítez – whose arrival for a brief stint at Inter coincided with Coutinho’s from South America – recommended Liverpool sign a midfield creator who should be challenging Gareth Bale and Luis Suárez for all sorts of awards next term.

Moreover Rodgers, widely regarded as inheriting a poisoned chalice when he swapped Swansea for Anfield last summer, also appears to have been done some transfer market favours by his immediate predecessor, Kenny Dalglish, after all.

Admittedly Dalglish paid top dollar for Andy Carroll, Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson and Carroll is on loan at West Ham, future uncertain, but, after the most underwhelming of beginnings, the latter pair are finally emerging from hibernation.

Those who initially believed Henderson to be a midfield dud dumped on Dalglish via some smart hype from his old club Sunderland and their former manager Steve Bruce especially, are – almost imperceptibly – changing their minds.

Early on he unleashed a 70-yard defence-splitting, Gerrard-esque, perhaps even Hoddle-esque, pass in Daniel Sturridge’s direction. With a little luck it might have produced a goal and Henderson – who came off to generous applause when he was replaced midway through the second half – continued to suggest he may yet win a regular England place.

The blameless victim of a tactical tweak, Downing, too, found himself withdrawn – but not until, courtesy of an odd fabulous cross and pass, he had revived memories of his early pomp at Middlesbrough when he was regarded as one of England’s finest young talents.

Rodgers is big on the importance of coaching and Henderson’s and Downing’s double renaissance represents an impressive endorsement of his skill in this department. Significantly, their revivals also indicate a new-found willingness to compromise on the part of a manager who, at Swansea, was so slavishly addicted to a carefully choreographed, short-passing possession game that you initially wondered whether Gerrard would have a place in his Merseyside blueprint.

The way Liverpool now punctuate an already varied passing range with some accurate long deliveries of the sort which would warm Sam Allardyce’s heart suggests Rodgers has learnt to value pragmatism. This flexibility suits Henderson and Downing while offering Coutinho and – when not suspended – Luis Suárez a suitable framework on which to construct their personal challenges to Manchester’s and London’s finest.

David Moyes – who may or may not be at Everton next season – has long been a tactical pragmatist but, whereas his extremely low budget, heavily set-piece reliant side are surely operating at their maximum level, Liverpool possess much more in reserve.

The heady 19th-century days when this city – one of the British Empire’s foremost international trading ports – exceeded London in wealth and had a US consulate established may never return. But Rodgers’s team is not necessarily in terminal decline.


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A news article on 2013-05-05 16:49:00 from: The Guardian

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GUARDIAN – Liverpool risking reputation with reaction to Luis Suárez bite controversy | Andy Hunter

Although the reaction from Anfield was swift and serious, Liverpool’s determination to retain their prize asset at all costs undermines their condemnation of his actions

The first text of the day read: “I hope you lot in the press won’t be making a mountain out of a molar hill.” In that toothless spirit it is worth noting Luis Suárez is believed to have left Anfield with Branislav Ivanovic’s shirt on Sunday, not a piece of his flesh, but that does not diminish the fact that Liverpool’s response to the unfathomable assault on the Chelsea defender runs contrary to the words of their manager, Brendan Rodgers. The prized asset continues to come before reputation in football.

Liverpool have reacted with impressive swiftness and seriousness to Suárez’s latest indiscretion. The club’s hierarchy was widely condemned for its inaction when the Uruguayan was found guilty by an Independent Regulatory Commission of using racially abusive language towards Patrice Evra. The then manager, Kenny Dalglish, was unwisely left to defend the club’s position until criticism intensified following the striker’s refusal to shake Evra’s hand at Old Trafford and Fenway Sports Group, the owner, exerted greater control.

“Kenny Dalglish defended him,” said another former Liverpool manager, Graeme Souness, in the Sky studio on Sunday. “He backed this same player to the hilt and who knows how much that contributed to Kenny not being here any more?”

PR lessons have evidently been learned from last season’s Evra debacle. Sunday’s three-pronged reaction – the Suárez apology plus condemnation from the managing director, Ian Ayre, and Rodgers – echoed the three statements that followed the non-handshake last February. Then, both Suárez and Dalglish apologised and Ayre issued a now all-too familiar company rebuke.

“We hope that he now understands what is expected of anyone representing Liverpool football club,” said Ayre, 14 months ago. Clearly, Suárez has not learned from staining his reputation repeatedly, damaging Liverpool’s image in the process, and requires the anger-management counselling being offered by the Professional Footballers’ Association. He is 26 years old.

Liverpool have not paid lip service to this latest problem. Ayre was bound for a promotional trip to the Far East and Australia when news reached him of the bite on Ivanovic. He immediately postponed the visit, returned from Manchester airport and instigated the meetings with Rodgers and Suárez that resulted in Sunday night’s statements and an undisclosed fine for the striker on Monday morning. The principal owner, John W Henry, and the chairman, Tom Werner, were also actively involved from Boston as Liverpool showed decisive leadership.

Internal punishment was immediate, though it is regrettable that Suárez and Ayre named the Hillsborough Family Support Group as recipients of the fine imposed on a player who earns more than £100,000 a week. “A local charity” would have sufficed instead of placing Margaret Aspinall, the HFSG’s formidable chair, in the position of having to defend the receipt. A club can fine a player a maximum of two weeks’ wages except in exceptional circumstances, and Liverpool have refused to say whether sinking teeth into an opponent falls into that category.

It was the rush to dispel doubts over Suárez’s Anfield future, with Ayre reiterating on LFC TV on Monday that the Uruguay international is not for sale and represents “everything we’d want in a striker”, that undermined Liverpool’s disciplinary stance, however.

It is folly to think a club that stood by their finest player throughout a racism controversy will now get rid as a result of a bite. But, equally, sparking a debate that Liverpool may still need to have – particularly if Suárez asks to leave this summer – suggested that protecting the value of its greatest asset is as important as protecting the club’s reputation. Suárez has repeatedly said he loves Liverpool and wishes to stay, yet the line he has to cross before FSG considers him too much trouble does not appear to exist.

Rodgers, not the media on a witch-hunt, first raised the issue of Liverpool being “a club with incredible values and ethics” during an awkward post-match press conference on Sunday. It is a familiar refrain from the Liverpool manager, who later conceded that no player is bigger than the club or irreplaceable. The treatment of Suárez indicates otherwise. Rodgers, like Dalglish before him, has discovered that backing Suárez to the hilt and being undermined by him comes with the job. He stood firmly behind the striker amid accusations of diving against Stoke City by Tony Pulis and had to backtrack when Suárez subsequently admitted cheating in an interview in Uruguay. The nature of the reprimand, as with the extent of the fine for biting Ivanovic, was not disclosed.

As a football team Liverpool cannot afford to sell Suárez this summer. The first Liverpool player to score 30 goals in a season since Fernando Torres, courtesy of a 97th minute equaliser against Chelsea on Sunday,, he carried the attacking threat almost single-handedly until January, giving Rodgers precious time to impose his ideas on the squad. He is the club’s one world-class forward and the absence of Champions League football for a fourth consecutive season limits the pool of possible replacements. But as a club the issue has to be considered, not instantly dismissed, and it would be advisable to abandon talk of values and ethics while Suárez remains on the payroll.

The former Liverpool’s and USA goalkeeper Brad Friedel summed up the unpalatable truth. “Liverpool have said it was unacceptable,” he commented. “There’s not a lot they can do except offer help with his anger issues. But I know the American owners will not be happy with what they’ve seen. At the same time, they’re businessmen and won’t want to just get rid of a £22m investment. They will try to work with him.”


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A news article on 2013-04-22 19:03:00 from: The Guardian

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TI – James Lawton: Save great club’s reputation by getting rid

What are Liverpool going to do about Luis Suarez? Is one of the great football clubs going to live on in the extreme and desperate belief that they need his talent much more than the cleansing effect of saying, “Adios hombre, thanks but in the end no thanks”.

A news article on 2013-04-21 21:47:00 from: The Independent

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ECHO – Liverpool FC News: Brendan Rodgers open to return of Kenny Dalglish to Liverpool FC

BRENDAN RODGERS insists he’s open to the idea of Kenny Dalglish coming back to Liverpool FC in an ambassadorial role.

A news article on 2013-04-19 22:06:00 from: Liverpool Echo

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GOAL – We have made progress under Rodgers, says Liverpool full-back Enrique

The Anfield outfit failed to win any silverware this year but the left-back believes the side have improved, while also indicating his happiness with the current brand of football

A news article on 2013-04-19 17:30:00 from: Goal

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TI – Liverpool better with Rodgers than Dalglish, says Glen Johnson

With Liverpool heading for their worst sequence of league finishes for 20 years, Glen Johnson insists Brendan Rodgers is right to claim there has been progress at Anfield.

A news article on 2013-04-08 19:35:00 from: The Independent

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