Brendan Rodgers

moejoe54 wrote:Everthing the new manager said today fills me with great hope for the future.Now to go buy my new Red Home Shirt and say yes we maybe not at the races at mo but with hope in our hearts we shall back to where we belong.

LFC YNWA.

Is it nice Joe, is it, is it.....

not got it yet get it,later this evening ya edgit.what ya think of interview today.

Didn't see it, is that it what Maj posted.

Just purchased now

yeah

http://www.liverpoolfc.tv/news/latest-news/rodgers-on-cole-and-sigurdsson

Interview

The snippets ive heard today of his take on the Sigurdsson situation have impressed me a lot.

Which were?

Dallas wrote:Which were?

"I knew what the market was & I wasn't prepared to pay anything over what I agreed to pay before." "I believed playing football will be most important to him but obviously it was important financially."

Nice one...

Press conference today

on Joe Allen life at Merseyside "I'm sure he's enjoyed his first couple of days here

on WBA match "In terms of tactics and my thoughts on the game, I've already got my team in mind

Europa

"It's good to start well - but it's more important you finish well

"Of course we ideally want to start well, but it's not the be all and end all if we don't

" The group will get stronger & stronger as the year goes on as they become more attuned to my methods & management"

....................................

"I want to make us as competitive as possible as we can be"

"I want to bring hopefully one or two new players to help the group here"

"It's important when you don't have lot of money you have to be different and play in different way

Brendan Rodgers "We are hoping in next 48 hours we will find out about new players

"Everyone wants to win trophies that's why I am here

"As a job I loved every minute of being Liverpool manager

"Football is my passion and Liverpool is way of life.

on Andy Carroll "He knows where he stands in relation to group

on Nuri Sahin and Cristian Tello "We will see in next 48 hours."

Costly reality intrudes on Rodgers' vision




Premier League Home

Sunday September 02 2012

Not signing Clint Dempsey sums up Liverpool's malaise, says Dion Fanning

There are some who would argue that replacing Andy Carroll with nobody, as Liverpool did on Friday night, is a fair swap.

At Upton Park yesterday, Carroll demonstrated what he can do in a team that sees simple terror as the most effective way of winning football matches. At Liverpool, however, he was a problem, albeit one created by others, particularly those who authorised his signing.

Since Sabermetrics became the desired business model for football clubs, any action in the transfer market leads to people grabbing Moneyball from the shelves with the zeal of an evangelist opening the Old Testament to exclaim why we're all doomed.

Liverpool had a pretty good summer in the transfer market and a pretty bad transfer deadline day. In January 2011, they had a triumphant transfer deadline day and they have been suffering for it and other mistakes since.

On one of the pages in Michael Lewis's book which explains Billy Beane's philosophy, there is an insight into how FSG are running Liverpool now and what they should have done before. "You can always recover from the player you didn't sign. You may never recover from the player you signed at the wrong price."

Liverpool are still trying to recover from the signing of Carroll for £35m, perhaps the wrongest price there has ever been in the spectacular history of wrong prices. It was so bad that FSG should sack themselves for signing off on it. Then they were new to English football and eager to make an impression.

The signing of Carroll calmed supporters after the sale of Torres. Yet if FSG had questioned Carroll's price, as they questioned Clint Dempsey's on Friday night, they might have angered supporters who, understandably, are angry again after the failure to sign Dempsey.

There is an argument to be made that Dempsey was over-priced, yet stalling on a fee of £5m which leaves Rodgers with only two strikers seems like an extreme implementation of their new philosophy.

Carroll seems to have been signed at a time when nobody was accountable but Liverpool are having to account for it now. Kenny Dalglish's defenders will point out that he was just a caretaker when Carroll was signed and couldn't have authorised the deal.

Ian Ayre was commercial director then and appointed managing director by the time Liverpool splurged again last summer. If only Damien Comolli can be directly implicated in the Carroll signing, nobody can dispute that Dalglish was involved in the catastrophic spending last summer when he paid too much for Stewart Downing and Jordan Henderson.

Liverpool are burdened with those players and for a club facing into a third season without Champions League football, there was always going to be some brutal realism, if anything can be more brutally realistic than watching Downing trying to play.

There are other painful realities. From the end of this transfer window to the opening of the next, Liverpool will pay close to £2m in wages to Joe Cole. Cole's arrival was greeted with hysterical celebration from many Liverpool fans who presumably would have been as angry if something had happened to prevent that deal as they were when Dempsey's fell through on Friday night.

They could thank Christian Purslow for the Cole deal as they operated a sort of an anti-Moneyball, with a determination to make as many spectacularly wrong decisions at the wrong price as they could.

FSG should have trusted their instincts long before this summer. There may have been too much of their instinct present last week. Ayre led the negotiations for Dempsey and was unconvincing again.

Liverpool knew there was no way back to Fulham for Dempsey who had burned his bridges quite spectacularly. Yet when Tottenham entered the fight, Fulham and Dempsey had an alternative and Liverpool were burnt.

If Liverpool want to see the danger of too much austerity they can look at Aston Villa, a club they helped tremendously last summer with their philanthropic gesture, the signing of Downing for £20m.

Villa have cut costs and suffered but there will be a money man somewhere arguing that they had no option but to drain all hope from the supporters.

Brendan Rodgers fought hard for what he wanted when he joined Liverpool. As a young manager, he might have been expected to be grateful for the opportunity and agreed to FSG's plan for sporting directors and football consultants.

Instead he showed the arrogance essential for the job when he said he would manage in his way. FSG abandoned their plans.

So far Rodgers has, moving on players like Carroll and Charlie Adam who were never capable of playing his way.

Yet FSG wanted to do things their way too. Rodgers won the argument on how the football club would be managed but they are more reluctant to abandon their ideas on how it should be financed.

This may seem like a very modern idea but the struggle between a manager and his board is one of the eternal battles in football. Maybe Rodgers learnt something on Friday night. He certainly became more aware of the dysfunction that still thrives at Liverpool.

#LFC - Sunday Times - Full Report by Jonathan Northcroft | Re: NURI SAHIN for £11m, Theo Walcott, and expectations for Rodgers.

LIVERPOOL have moved to mollify Brendan Rodgers after the manager was angered by his club’s failure to sign Clint Dempsey on transfer deadline day.

Fenway Sports Group (FSG), the club's owners, are willing to address Rodgers’ strong desire to sign a forward in the January transfer window with Theo Walcott a possible target. FSG have also reassured Rodgers that the imbalance in his squad left by Liverpool’s summer dealings – he now has just two senior strikers – will be taken into account when this season’s performance is reviewed. They see the problem as a short-term one and maintain that the goal set for Rodgers is a longer term one: delivering Champions League football by 2015.

The owners are fixing transfer policy accordingly. A move for Dempsey on Friday was abandoned after Fulham accepted an offer of £4m plus add-ons from Aston Villa for the American striker but refused to deal with Liverpool on similar terms. They then quoted Spurs a price of £8m before allowing Dempsey to move to Tottenham for £6m. FSG’s reluctance to bid higher for Dempsey was down to his age – 29. They are prepared to make much higher sums available for younger players and a £15m permanent deal for Daniel Sturridge was lined up on Friday but Rodgers’ preference was to take the Chelsea striker on loan.

Though the failure to sign Dempsey agitated Rodgers, the manager will be placated by the promise of being backed generously in future transfer windows including a bid for Walcott, a player he has long admired. Arsenal blocked Walcott leaving for Manchester City last week but cannot count on extending the attacker’s contract. Walcott has been offered £80,000 per week but, given that Arsenal use him heavily in commercial campaigns, he wants added image rights payments. Come January, Walcott will have just a few months left to run on his present deal and his enthusiasm for staying at Arsenal may be further tested this afternoon with Arsene Wenger planning to drop him for the match at Liverpool.

At 23, Walcott fits the profile of players FSG want to acquire. Despite talk of budget restraints, Liverpool spent £25m (when add-ons are included) on Joe Allen, 22, and Fabio Borini, 21 in summer and more would have been available had buyers been found for Carroll, Jordan Henderson and Stuart Downing.

The trio, and Charlie Adam, who was sold to Stoke for £4m, were bought during a £110m spree by Kenny Dalglish and former director of football, Damien Comolli. Not repeating the mistakes of Comolli and Dalglish - who rushed into paying £35m for Carroll on deadline day in January 2012 - influenced FSG’s decision not to enter an auction for Dempsey simply to address an immediate need.

There is sympathy that this has left Rodgers with only Luis Suarez and Fabio Borini as forwards but confidence that this can be corrected in January – not least because the terms of Carroll’s loan to West Ham would allow Liverpool to recall the striker then. FSG also believe it important to keep funds back to offer the option of making Nuri Sahin’s signing permanent. Acquiring Sahin on loan from Real Madrid – ahead of Arsenal – was a major coup and Liverpool can buy the former Bundesliga player of the year for around £11m should his loan spell go well.

Ian Ayre, Liverpool’s chief executive, has borne the brunt of supporters’ fury about deadline day but his position is not threatened, despite renewed speculation about his future following reports in Australia that Gillon McLachlan, chief operating officer of the Australian Football League, had turned down the chance to replace Ayre earlier this year.