I believe alot of it is belief in yourselves. Think back to Rafa's speech to the team at half time in istanbul, this is the perfect example of instilling belief into your team. Its getting your team to the level mentally that they believe they can and will go out and beat every side. The reason fergie and mourinho got it instilled into their sides so easily is mainly down to them as people. If you think about them they are very similar, although both admittedly great at what they do they both have this arrogance within them and they seem to always believe nothing is their fault and are happy to complain if anything goes against them but not take criticism if its the other way around.
The main thing they did was put this arrogance into their players, look at ronaldo... When he was younger he would cry when he wouldnt succeed. As much as i hate him i used to love his hunger for success, he seemed adamant that he would succeed and although back then it wasnt arrogance it has come to being just that through fergusons management of him. Unfortunately for red nose it has come back to bite him in his backside as ronaldo now wants out and part of this is still that hunger from his childhood and him always dreaming of playing for madrid but alot of it is also that arrogance. Just look at the mancs and the chelsea side mourinho managed, the players who were closest to those managers were the ones who had the highest level of thinking that 'no one is as good as us and no one can be'. Rooney, Ferdinand, Neville, Ronaldo are the main manc ones, as for chelsea it was drogba, terry, lampard. And the thing that you will notice is they are the ones that always complain, especially to the ref, they always feel that they have done nothing wrong and the opposition is in the wrong. Even a blatant foul and getting booked for it will see them complaining and shouting asif they won the ball cleanly when they know they didnt.
In terms of liverpool i dont want that arrogance but i want belief. There is a thin line between the two but you rarely see us being loud and disrespectful of our opponents whereas you do see it from the other sides. Things like diving come into this aswell, its a mentality of we will do anything to win (even cheat). Of course i dont want this in our team, i hate it i think it goes against everything football is about but the thing i do want is the belief from our players that we are capable of winning every game we play and that we are good enough to win the premier league the champions league the fa cup and the carling cup. Alot of a teams mentality is reflected in how you see the manager act, of course there will be differences from individuals but the ones that are closest to the manager are always the ones that are similar.
I think we will have it again, we just need the players to have more belief in themselves. I believe the team we are most similar to is spain (national team) we have the players but its a big question of belief. When we do have belief we blow teams away and it all looks so natural but we dont have that belief often enough. We need to go out into every game to win not to just stop the opposition from winning. I think rafa can instill this into our side and he is a very smart manager, he will do it in a more subtle way than the others did.
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