Brendan Rodgers no longer preaching from the moral high ground

Brendan Rodgers made it all sound so simple.

“It’s not so hard to bring the ball out from the back on the floor, you know.”

The new Liverpool manager had taken Luis Suárez aside to explain the changes he hoped to make to the team's style of play. The way he put it, it was essentially impossible for an opponent to stop Liverpool playing the ball out from defence.

It was a numbers game: three against one, four against two, five against three. Whenever the goalkeeper Pepe Reina passed it out from the back, the play would unfold according to predictable laws – a game of tic-tac-toe in which Liverpool would always be one step ahead.

“I listened and I was sold,” Suárez reveals in his new autobiography. “It seemed so simple but no one had ever walked me through it like that before.”

There’s no reason to doubt Suárez when he tells us that Rodgers at least knew how to talk a good game. On Saturday, you wondered whether he was watching from Barcelona as his old team tried to play the ball out from the back against Newcastle.

Presumably aware that any attempt to win the ball back in Liverpool’s half would founder on the iron laws of mathematics, Newcastle simply sat back, watching Liverpool’s defenders ponderously pass the ball to each other with no idea of what was going to happen once they crossed the half way line.

The ball would ultimately end up at the feet of Joe Allen or Jordan Henderson. They would turn and, with something like forlorn resignation, give the ball straight back to Newcastle.

Single chance

The team that scored 101 goals in the league last season failed to create a single chance from open play and ultimately should have lost by more than one goal. Things don’t seem so simple any more.

The pattern of the match underlined the reality that the real problem with Liverpool this season is not in defence but in attack.

This is awkward for Rodgers because since arriving at Liverpool, he has prided himself on his ability to coach attacking play.

When Chelsea came to Anfield in April and killed Liverpool's title challenge, Rodgers criticised Jose Mourinho for employing defensive anti-football tactics. "It's defensive, and the polar opposite of the way we work . . . It's not difficult to coach to just get 10 players right on your 18-yard box . . . It's not my way of working. I like to take the initiative in games and let players express themselves."

If you are going to criticise someone like Jose Mourinho for overly defensive play and implicitly praise yourself for approaching the game in a more positive spirit, you had better make sure your team doesn’t forget how to attack.

It’s now painfully clear the attacking brilliance Liverpool often showed last season owed considerably more to the individual genius of Suárez than to Rodgers’ philosophy.

Last season, when the likes of Allen or Henderson turned in midfield, they had Suárez ahead of them racing into a dangerous position, inviting a simple pass that his individual ability could turn into a lethal one. “[Rodgers] was confident that if I could take [defenders] on one-on-one, I would be likely to beat them,” Suárez says.

In fact, Suárez gave Liverpool more than that. As Roberto Martinez remarked after the Merseyside derby in September: "Any time you left yourself two-on-one against Suárez, you were in trouble."

Rodgers’ system rested on numerical superiority to move the ball out from the back, but Suárez’s talent in the final third was the spark that lit everything up.

The most obviously misaligned cog in Liverpool's new, dysfunctional attacking mechanism is Mario Balotelli, who doesn't seem to read the intentions of his team-mates and cannot be relied upon to keep the ball and bring others into play.

Over the last two months Balotelli has been criticised by everybody up to and including his manager, but he can’t be accused of letting anybody down because he is playing exactly as he has always played. He has delivered exactly what Liverpool should have expected.

Wispy presence

Arguably a bigger problem for Liverpool is that they replaced Suárez with a host of attackers who can’t win the one-on-one battles he used to win.

Adam Lallana

has the ability to send opponents the wrong way, but lacks the speed to get away from them.

Lazar Markovic

is a wispy presence who is adapting to English football at his own extremely leisurely pace. At the time these players arrived, they appeared to increase the options available to Rodgers, but in fact, between them, they don’t offer as many options as Suárez did by himself.

Good imitation

A better approach might have been to focus the resources they divided between nearly-men like Lallana and Markovic on a single world-class talent, such as Alexis Sánchez, who is currently performing a pretty good imitation of Suárez for Arsenal. Sánchez supposedly favoured a move to Arsenal over Liverpool, but Liverpool might have changed his mind with money. It always comes down to money in professional football; that’s why Sergio Agüero is playing for Manchester City.

Liverpool shied away from investing a Suárez-sized sum in a single player, presumably because they considered it would have been a huge risk. But timidity carries its own risks, as they are finding out to their cost.