Steven Gerrard’s 87th minute winner – potentially the last goal of his illustrious Liverpool career – should have been the prevailing talking point from Liverpool’s 2-1 win over QPR last weekend. But Saturday’s cause for celebration was overshadowed by a rouge plane flying above Anfield, dragging the message ‘Rodgers Out Rafa In’ across the Mersey sky.
Indeed, it seems a significant portion of the Reds fanbase have lost faith in Rodgers amid a difficult campaign at Anfield, where £110million’s worth of summer signings have struggled to settle, spiritual leader Steven Gerrard has declined with age and Liverpool have failed to claim any silverware or retain their Champions League status for another season.
But searching for a brighter future in the past has never been a wise move in the world of football. In an industry where the pressure of expectation is interlinked with the likelihood of results, attempting to turn back the hands of time rarely produces a repetition of success.
Of course, there are examples testifying otherwise; Jose Mourinho’s second spell at Chelsea, now bearing the Capital One Cup and Premier League title, being amongst the most obvious and recent.
But some Liverpool fans’ apparent lust for former gaffer Rafa Benitez is a bizarre one. Unlike Mourinho, who won the Champions League with Inter Milan and a La Liga title with Real Madrid after leaving Stamford Bridge in 2007, the Spaniard’s spent much of the five years since his Anfield departure in the managerial wilderness.
He lasted just six months at Inter Milan, producing a win rate of 48% at a club that had claimed the treble the season previous. And although his infamous ‘interim’ spell as Chelsea manager gained Benitez widespread support for winning the 2013 Europa League title and remaining ever-dignified despite working under the most extreme of circumstances, it was hardly a tenure of resounding success – more in line with night-watchman job Avram Grant had done many years before.
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Now, the 55 year-old is set to be discarded by Napoli after failing to qualify for the Champions League in an Italian top flight where third-place Lazio have already lost nine games. To give some comparison, fourth-place Manchester United have lost just eight games this term – despite the Premier League being considered a far more competitive division – and Napoli clinched a European spot with just six defeats last season.
So rather ironically, some Liverpool fans want to replace Rodgers with a manager who has failed to achieve the same ultimate aim of Champions League qualification in a lower quality league with a more settled squad, including two of Serie A’s most prominent talents in Gonzalo Higuain and Jose Callejon. And let’s not forget why Benitez left Liverpool in the first place; he oversaw a 2009/10 campaign in which the Reds finished seventh, catalysing a downward spiral of Europa League mediocrity that only Rodgers has truly got them out of.
The counter-acting theory is that the Spaniard knows the club better than any manager potentially on the market this summer, whilst his conservative philosophy has proved successful in both the Premier League and Europe, with three continental titles – including the 2005 Champions League, one of the greatest triumphs in Anfield history – on his CV.
Yet it’s not so much the man himself, more what he represents, that Liverpool fans desperately crave. Benitez’ six-year Liverpool tenure included two major trophies as well as a Community Shield and UEFA Super-Cup; Rodgers, in stark juxtaposition, is the first long-term manager in Liverpool history not to win silverware in his first three seasons. What the Reds want is a return to their trophy-laden past.
But these are very different times on Merseyside. Benitez joined a club that had finished outside the Premier League’s top five just once in the decade before his arrival, and was privy to some of English football’s top talents in Jamie Carragher, Steven Gerrard, Xabi Alonso, Javier Mascherano and Fernando Torres. Rodgers, in contrast, inherited a team that hadn’t finished inside the Premier League’s top five once in the three years prior to his appointment, and a squad he’s had to rebuild – to a debatable degree of success – from the ground up, whilst complying with the Fenway Sports Group model imposed upon him.
Although Liverpool are still a long way from becoming the European powerhouse of old, I don’t view the current campaign as a particular disappointment. Yes, it’s finished rather underwhelmingly and without any form of tangible recognition; but the Reds reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup and the Capital One Cup and will likely finish just one place shy of Champions League qualification, despite Rodgers losing talismanic attacker Luis Suarez to Barcelona, first-choice centre-forward Daniel Sturridge to injury, captain Steven Gerrard to age and 2014 Golden Boy winner Raheem Sterling to the distracting rumours of the tabloids. With a bit more luck and a few less injuries, things could have been very different this season.
But until the cohort of disillusioned Liverpool fans accept the past, including Benitez, is indeed the past, a dark cloud will always linger over Rodgers. It’s time to separate the last six seasons from the rest of Anfield history and consider the Reds’ overall progress since the Ulsterman’s arrival within it’s own context. When compared to how little Benitez has done in the same time period, suddenly Rodgers becomes the far superior option.
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