Rodgers And Out

Not very long ago, Brendan Rodgers was the best young manager in the country. I know - he was even better than David Moyes. He led a side full of vim and vigour - a veritably Keeganesque mixture of attacking wizardry and defensive stupidity, with a little splash of King Kev's heroic failure to top it off.

That Liverpool team had a hellluva lot to recommend it. Gerrard was magnificently resisting the status of grizzled veteran, a kind of Scouse Pirlo, Sturridge was a stiletto blade of a striker, Sterling buzzed round in his Little Richard bouffant, hell even Jordan Henderson started to resemble a footballer. And the real bite was provided by a wantaway front man who transformed himself from villain to hero in nine short months.

Suarez left, Sturridge limped, Sterling mooched, Gerrard moped, and each has been replaced by... by a lamentably poor clutch of misfits. Even then, Koppites witnessed two Cup semifinals, but for a club who can justifiably wallow in past success, this is small beer. In fact it's not even beer - it's flat Lambrusco.

Rodgers' days have been numbered for some time now. And yet he has done his best to carry that large head around on that tiny body with the same confidence he had when Suarez was doing things Derren Brown could only dream of.

Even in the aftermath of another formless and nondescript performance, Rodgers would insist he can't criticise his players who had given everything. Brendan seemed not to realise that Everything = Nowhere Near Enough.

His main crime - and here the blame can be fairly shared around - has been the squandering of huge sums of money received from the sale of Suarez and Sterling. It's a struggle to think of anyone Bren's bought who could be considered even a qualified success.

Top of the list of misfits was Balotelli, a sort of kryptonite to the supermen of Rodgers's 2014 vintage. Ballotelli makes the original Maverick look positively conservative. Why Liverpool thought they could tame this fruit-loop is beyond, well, everyone.

Added to that, Rodgers seemed incapable of looking beyond Southampton and ripped the heart out of the Saints. Unfortunately, by the time it reached Anfield that heart was suffering from serious arrhythmia. Dejan Lovren transformed from defensive rock to powdery chalk, Adam Lallana went from nimble and inventive to nonplussed and defective, and Ricky Lambert... well at least he got to spend a bit of time back home, la'.

Recently Firmino and Benteke have turned up, neither of whom seemingly aware of why or how that happened. You can't help feeling Liverpool's transfer policy, conducted as it is by a 'transfer committee', is a total dog's dinner. It's not so much a constructive way to unearth real potential and talent as a kind of Merseyside X-Factor audition all of its own, with Ian Ayre playing Simon Cowell and whoever the can-carrying numpty who gets the manager's job playing Louis Walsh.

Jurgen Klopp is the new man, it seems. Here's a bloke who cuts the right sort of dash. He's got specs and he speaks a few languages which makes him smarter than your average gaffer. Dortmund were a fine outfit under his tutelage. And, as Arsene is Arsenal so Klopp could be to the Kop.

But the first thing he has to do, surely, is be allowed to select transfer targets and pick players who he sees might fit into a structure of his choosing. Otherwise, in three years' time we'll be looking at another £292 million that's gone to waste after the likes of Coutinho have been flogged to La Liga for the price of five no-marks.

But Rodgers, decent fella though he is, had to go.

Meanwhile, in other sports, the nation (that's England) is slowly edging out from behind the sofa, faces as white as the team shirts, as the Stuart Lancaster's men go into hiding. It was not pretty, that mauling at the hands of the Wallabies. (And that's just rubbing it in, too, isn't it? Australia is full of the animal kingdom's most poisonous bastards and yet we get beat by a pack of iddy-biddy kangaroos).

Two things about this:

one, England haven't been much cop for a few seasons now - even in terms of the Six Nations they've not been great and they were never going to win the whole thing;

two, home advantage is supposed to count for summat so how come England ended up in a group with Wales, Australia and Fiji? Look at the other frigging groups! I mean New Zealand have barely had to break sweat, South Africa can afford a humiliating defeat and still get Scotland as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Why couldn't they have recruited Sepp Blatter to do the draw? Warm those balls and the hosts don't suffer. Everyone knows that!

Of course Lancaster has to walk. He picked a brilliant League player in Burgess but had no idea where he should be played at Union. He deselected the stand-off Ford for the Wales game when England's whole attacking platform for eighteen months had been built around him. And even though there are many, many more people in England playing the game than anywhere else in the world, England still manage to resemble a bunch of lumbering cybermen who've run on to the pitch through a line of hospital bed-linen and can't quite get the sheets off their faces. Dire, it was.

And as with Liverpool, that's no going to change soon, but with a different bloke in charge, at least there's a chance it might.

In the meantime, let's support someone else. I'm backing Ireland. Life's more fun that way.