His first six months can almost be forgiven - any manager needs time to settle at a new club. The second half of his first season we saw some signs of good football and it was promising.
His second season was truly remarkable. We almost won the league playing champagne football. I refuse to believe that we were a one man team in Suarez. He obviously helped, but football is a team game. In particular, Gerrard, Sturridge, Sterling, Coutinho, Flanno all had superb seasons as well.
His third season was a disaster. Embarrassed in Europe. Finishing 6th. Getting dicked by sh*te like Stoke 6-1. Simply not good enough. As frustrated as I was, I gave BR the benefit of the doubt though. He lost his star man Suarez. Sturridge was injured all season. Gerrard noticeably lost his legs. It was rumoured some of our transfers weren't 'Brendan signings' - Balotelli. A lot of new players needed time to bed into the team & gel with our other players.
I've always said this season will be the one where I will judge him properly. I've always stated I think BR is a top manager based on what I saw in his second season. I was glad FSG backed him this season. So should we succeed then great, obviously. Should we fail then its time up Brendan I'm afraid.
What has annoyed me this summer though is bearing in mind how much we struggled to attack teams last season playing with the one striker, what does Brendan go and do? Spend big money on Benteke and start the season playing him alone upfront. My support for him is slowly starting to fade and it's almost as if Brendan is hammering the final nails into his coffin himself.
Is it any coincidence that we have scored just two goals from our four games so far and look toothless going forward? We only scored v Stoke because of Coutinhos brilliant screamer but up until that moment (90th minute winner) we hadn't created anything! We were only slightly better v Bournemouth (but not much!) and we scored a jammy offside goal. Arsenal we were good for 45mins to be fair and West Ham we were back to being awful again!
It was apparent to me that based on last season, we needed pace in the team, some movement, bloody mobile forwards and to play TWO of them up top. So Brendan spends 33m on a big static centre forward who could potentially be a beast if you supply him with the right ball to him but in a Brendan Rodgers side that just isn't going to happen. Big Ben has looked isolated in all four games. I'm not surprised one bit, I was shouting my head off all summer about it on here.
I can't see Benteke and Sturridge forming a partnership and I have a bad feeling that Brendan will jeopardise the team by playing Sturridge out wide once he is fit again.
This will ultimately see him sacked in my opinion. I just don't see how we are going to score goals. Unless he changes his set up quickly and figures out how to get the best out of Benteke then I predict another long season for us, almost identical to last.
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