When Brendan Rodgers spoke of the "calculated gamble" he had made in bringing Mario Balotelli to Liverpool, deep in his heart he knew that he was talking about his own career as a manager of the first rank.
Rodgers’s sure-footed climb through the treacherous and cut-throat world of professional football management has been a terrific story and a testament to his cleverness and skill and ambition. If he caught a lucky break, it was that he was looked to be brightest of the smart lads when Liverpool’s trustees searched for a new figure to lead their ailing institution.
Rogers was young, bright, plausible. He understood and clearly revered the culture and tradition at the club and the senior players soon warmed to him. The business of football moves at such speed now that it is almost forgotten that the man whom Rogers succeeded at Liverpool was none other than Kenny Dalglish, always the darling of the Kop and whose return to management, after a decade out of the game, was both an admission of Liverpool's vain search for a totemic leader in the mould of Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger and an acknowledgement of the reverence with which they regard former gods of the Kop.
There is comfort in the familiar. Guiding Liverpool to the 2011 FA Cup final and winning the League cup was not enough to save Dalglish's job. An eighth-place finish in the league was not acceptable to New England Sports Ventures. The win/loss ratio just too high.
But perhaps the most significant thing that Dalglish did during his final tenure at Anfield was to bring a truly great player to the club. And we are not talking about the €45 million signing Andy Carroll here.
Stroke of luck
No, at the same time Liverpool bought
Luis Suarez
from
Ajax
for €28 million, having finally given a declining
Fernando Torres
to
Chelsea
for €64 million. So the second great stroke of luck for Brendan Rodgers was that he had a genius in the dressing room when he arrived.
What happened to Liverpool last season was the definition of fabulous: it was an event that had no basis in reality. Through the narrow close season in 2013, there was considerable doubt as to whether Suarez, still smarting from the Chelsea-bite-disgrace, would remain at Liverpool. And if there was something faintly pathetic about a great football club holding its breath while the boy king pondered his next move, the bottom line was they needed him.
And so he stayed and Liverpool had an unexpectedly devastating start to the league, posting wins against Stoke, Aston Villa and Manchester United. And it was then that Rodgers must have had the owners purring. Anfield was roaring. Their only loss before Suarez returned was against Southampton. Maybe that is where they lost the league: at home to the Saints on September 21st.
Then Suarez came back and it wasn't just that he brought the dazzling range of goal-scoring prowess and audacity that stunned the entire English Premier League fraternity, it was the attitude. Suarez played through that winter as if he was having the time of his life. He emboldened his team-mates: it was no coincidence that Daniel Sturridge had the season of his young life. Moreover, through Suarez, Liverpool dared to bring their league credentials out of the deep freeze.
Fans and old boys alike dared to speak of themselves as potential champions of the league. Their league. During the streak when they couldn’t stop winning games, Rodgers looked as if he had the mysterious alchemy that separates the great managers from the merely competent. Maybe he had somehow convinced Suarez of the Liverpool fairytale: took him through the scrapbook of Shankly and Paisley and made him believe that he, this Uruguayan kid, was the next chapter, waiting to be written.
In retrospect, it would appear that Suarez looked around him and felt some affection for the hugely emotional fans who loved him like a son and wondered at their profound attachment to their damp and old-world river city and figured: if I can win them the title they so crave, I can leave with a clear conscience. And he gave it an unholy stab.
For a few hours, after they beat Manchester City in mid April at Anfield, it was almost possible to believe in the impossible. But no: in the league, the best and strongest always wins. Liverpool, in their years of pomp, offered remorseless proof of that. Still, English football came as close as it ever did or will to having an individual player land a league title. It was the year of Suarez. And then it was over.
Dramatically alter
Rodgers knew from the beginning that Balotelli was no kind of replacement for Suarez. There are only a handful of players in any sport who can dramatically alter the trajectory of a team. Suarez could do that and he slipped through Liverpool’s fingers. Balotelli, even at his best, could be nothing more than a booby prize.
We outsiders can only guess at the motivations which cause the perennially unsettled Italian to screw things up for so royally. Maybe he is disaffected, maybe he finds the brutal scrutiny which comes with being an elite striker unbearable or maybe he is just bat-s**t crazy. The shirt-swapping escapade was silly and vaguely depressing but inconsequential in the greater scheme of things.
The brutal truth is that Rodgers settled for Balotelli because none of the best players in the world want to come to Liverpool, not anymore. They don’t want to come to a club that hasn’t won a league title since the last days of communism. They don’t want to live in a provincial city. They want the bright lights.
It was cruel on Wednesday night, watching the football travel obediently to the feet of one Real Madrid player after another. For a club that placed so much store on its ability to eclipse the great cities of the continent on European nights, it was a long and painful illustration of just how far removed they are now from the cutting edge of the game.
The only thing that keeps Liverpool great now is their fans, with their collective insistence that further glory is on the horizon. Keeping Liverpool relevant as a force is the daunting task facing Rodgers now and it may have dawned on him on Wednesday night that he is in the midst of what could be the defining season of his managerial career.
Eamon Dunphy put it best on Wednesday night when he said that it would be sad to see Liverpool slide out of the picture, as Leeds United have done. That is the danger and that is the task facing Rodgers.
Bob Paisley’s quip – “I’ve been here for bad times too . . . one year we finished second” – now has a valedictory edge to it.
