Rebuilding the Liverpool mosaic: Brendan Rodgers on the brink

Rebuilding the Liverpool mosaic: Brendan Rodgers on the brink

By Matthew Dunne-Miles

It’s early August and Brendan Rodgers stands outside the Anfield locker room. Nervously he grabs the door handle, takes a deep breath and opens it with trepidation, ready to dazzle the team with some Socrates in order to prepare them for a season without European football. 

As the door creaks open and he steps inside, a tumbleweed slowly rolls past his feet; there is deafening silence occasionally disrupted by the drip, drip, drip of a loose shower faucet somewhere in the distance. 

‘Is…is anybody there?’ Rodgers enquires, his accent, concocted from bits of Sean Connery, Gerry Adams and the Go Compare man, echoes off the changing room walls.

He makes his way over to Jamie Carragher’s empty locker through a sea of dry ice, whilst vibrato guitar begins to play in the background. Rodgers presses his hands and face against the cold steel door and closes his eyes. 

'Et tu Carra?’ he whispers before looking down and spotting a note addressed to 'The Gaffer’ on the bench below. He carefully unfolds it, reads the words he never wished to see and puts his head in his hands as the note drops into the mist below in slow motion. 

'To Brendan, we’ve left. Sincerely, all your talent’

As he drops to his knees and lets out a cinematically elongated 'no,’ he suddenly awakes in a cold sweat at home to find it was all just a Lynchian nightmare…that is, until he checks the transfer rumours and finds that the nightmare is still very much a possibility. 

It seems that if the collective mutterings of the press, Twitter and the players themselves are to be believed, then it could be a very minimal roll call for Liverpool Football Club next season.

Let’s start with the definite; there will be no Jamie Carragher next season, and that is most definitely a loss to morale. Every club requires consistent figures and Carra has been 'the immovable object’ of Liverpool’s back line since the mid-1990s. Despite the fact his legs aren’t what they used to be, the big man from Merseyside still cut a daunting figure for any Premiership striker and was an essential part of the furniture of LFC. 

Add to this the rumours of Pepe Reina to Barcelona, Martin Skrtel to Arsenal and the fact that Luis Suarez has gone from making subtle 'wink wink nudge nudge’ cryptic references about leaving to a more obvious plea to Real Madrid to come snap him up (only biting reference, I promise), and Brendan Rodgers is left with little to work with. 

After the Northern Irishman with a thousand accents took over from King Kenny last summer he was a left with a pool of talent that was all swimming in different directions. To his credit, he managed to turn this collection of mis-matched materials into a mosaic that occasionally resembled a Liverpool of old, and his ability to resurrect players who had fallen away at other clubs into some of his star performers (Sturridge and Coutinho) shows that all that philosophical pre-game spiel must be working for some people. Like the kooky English teacher that got you to understand Macbeth. 

However, as even an amateur mosaic artist will tell you: if someone keeps stealing your best tiles then your mosaic probably won’t be as good. Although Liverpool look to United for a sense of what they could be, they may in fact have to look to another club in the West for what the future might hold. 

A history full of success and dedicated fan base? Check. A strong youth programme? Check. First team talent ransacked by clubs that offer European football? Indeed. It seems that the closest model of Merseyside’s future could be that of Aston Villa’s current predicament: narrowly avoiding relegation with a team of youngsters who then run into the arms of teams with prospects of progression. This could be you, Liverpool, unless that Suarez money is invested wisely and the future is more Coutinho and less Kolo Toure… But as transfer rumours roll on,  Brendan Rodgers shall not be sleeping soundly just yet. 

Matthew Dunne-Miles is a Journalism student currently at Edinburgh Napier University. Comments below please.