Love him or like him less – and we are guessing that many Liverpool fans are in the latter category – Manchester United legend Paul Scholes does tend to talk a lot of sense in relation to football.
He seemed so shy during his playing days but has been surprisingly shooting from the hip as a pundit since he hung up his boots. His opinions regularly put noses out of joint. But we find his direct approach refreshing and he’s obviously an insightful commentator on the game.
In his weekly column he has turned his attention to the Liverpool malaise and reckons that Brendan Rodgers is paying for his flying start at the club. He writes in The Evening Standard:
Liverpool’s chance to break that cycle was last season,
Six months on from that finale in May and Brendan Rodgers is paying the price for having overachieved with Liverpool. They got so close and the assumption in some quarters was that Liverpool could push on and do what United did in 1993, going from second to first. But Liverpool look further away than 12 months ago.
Things are on a knife edge at Liverpool right now. The painful reality could be that Luis Suarez masked the deficiencies of the coach and the team with his abundant match winning performances last season. With him gone and Sturridge out, Liverpool look toothless. And although personnel changes are being made regularly by the Northern Irishman, as he searches for his best team, the style of play remains timid, slow and uncertain.
We believe that Liverpool will improve as the season goes on. Let’s not forget that they looked fairly uncertain at the beginning af last season too. Noone could have predicted, in the autumn of 2013, how frighteningly quick, coherent and powerful they would become. But the second half of the season belonged to them.
That said, the loss of Luis can’t be overstated, and we aren’t certain that Rodgers will get to fulfil all of his ambitions with Liverpool.
Liverpool fans: stick or twist with the manager?
