The Independent Liverpool FC Website, Red and White Kop


Title: Brendan Talks To RAWK - December 21st 2012
Post by: Sarah Deane on December 22, 2012, 03:52:56 pm
A bit short this month - pesky Christmas takes up a lot of time, so....

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When Brendan Rodgers walks into a room, it's hard not to take notice. Surprisingly short in stature, he more than makes up for it with a presence that's so instantly charismatic, he has grown men almost bowing to him as he shakes their hands.

RAWK is at Melwood for another Q&A with the forums, and all of us here have two burning questions:

What's going to happen in the January transfer window?
and
What the hell happened against Villa?

The former, is a question Rodgers is understandably reticent to answer, the main reason being he simply doesn't know and, even if he did, it would be a bit stupid to tell a bunch of websites his game plan. He wants "2 or 3 players", but won't be drawn on specifics, except to say, a bit obviously, that there are "areas which need support" and "we need to bring in goalscorers". Understandably, Rodgers is wary of the press and discourages fans from believing anything they read in the papers.

About the Villa game, Rodgers is quite clear on what went so wrong. "Last weekend, it's probably as confident as we've been [before the game]. But what we lost last week, for me, was graft, sheer hard graft. That was missing from our game."

The players, he reckons, were suffering from a major bout of over-confidence.

"It was complacency." he says, "All week, you couldn't avoid it, the radio...the papers...everyone saying that Liverpool could be top four, and everyone's feeling that, and everyone's thinking that. And the Friday before the game, the atmosphere here was fantastic. But there are a lot of inexperienced players in our group, and they're hearing these things, and no matter what you tell them, they're believing it, but you have to go through experiences, to realise that no matter what people say, think or do, you have to graft. We never got the goal early on, and then when we went behind, we just didn't have the intensity or the aggression in our game."

What really riled him, however, was seeing fans leaving Anfield with still 20 minutes to go.

"It was probably as disappointed as I've been. We're not always going to get the results, it happens in football. But the one thing I never, ever want to see, is the home supporters walking out of Anfield, with fifteen, twenty minutes to go. That's not acceptable. It's not acceptable that they don't believe we're going to get something from the game. That was something that hurt."

Rodgers is acutely aware of how not killing off games, has cost us points.

"I'm as frustrated as you. We dominate games so much and sometimes you only go 1-0 in front, but no matter how much you dominate a game, and it can become a war in the last ten minutes, you scrape through, but you get no comfort. You think 'we should have won that by so much more'"

Despite the many dropped points of the season so far, though, Rodgers still has his eye on a decent second half of the season. "It'll be tough, but we still can make the top four. I genuinely believe that."

For the full interview, including his opinions on players' agents, the evolution of Jordan Henderson and Jose Enrique, and why "Being Liverpool" was "about as far removed from who I am", click below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaDGGZJonVo&list=UU30avO2n6knAFiH2c8e4qiw&index=3


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