To say that Liverpool's season finale was ugly is a massive understatement. Yes, club legend and captain Steven Gerrard scored in his final match with a liverbird on his chest, but that wasn't nearly enough to outweigh the agony of Liverpool's horrid first half, which saw them ship five goals to Stoke City in a series of jaw-droppingly awful defensive mistakes. Stoke would add a sixth goal for good measure in the second half, and the 6-1 loss has left Liverpool fans enraged and their manager red-faced.
Brendan Rodgers embarrassed, willing to leave Liverpool
Liverpool’s manager has offered a mea culpa after their shocking 6-1 defeat at the hands of Stoke City in their last match of the season, and says he’ll leave the club if that’s what the owners feel is the right course of action.
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"It was embarrassing," Brendan Rodgers told the media after the match ended. The result has done nothing to quell the rising pressure the Northern Irish manager has felt of late, and things might be reaching a breaking point. "If the owners want me to go, I'll go. But I still feel like I have a lot to offer here. However, I take full responsibility for today as manager, we have to go away and fix this."
The words are surprising from Rodgers, who can normally spin any result into something positive from the squad, something that’s left fans frustrated and annoyed many times over the course of a disappointing season for Liverpool. After taking the title race all the way to the wire last season before finishing second, and after spending £100 million in the summer transfer market, Liverpool fell painfully flat this season, ending the season in sixth place, crashing out of the Champions League group stage, losing the first Europa League knockout round and falling well short in both domestic cup semifinals.
At this point, it wouldn’t be terribly surprising to see Rodgers either resign or get fired, but then the question is this: who are Liverpool going to get that’s better? Jürgen Klopp is available, but it seems unlikely on the surface that he’d take over Liverpool without them being in the Champions League. Old friend Rafa Benitez is also on the market, but may be close to a deal with Real Madrid, and has had plenty of his own frustrations over the last couple of years with Napoli.
Get past them and you have a bunch of managers without much of an established history at the level Liverpool want to be at. They may have potential, but they’re really a crapshoot in terms of what will actually happen. For Liverpool, it might not be worth the risk to change managers just for the sake of change. Better the devil you know, and all that.
A change could certainly be justified at this point, but Liverpool have to be sure that their next manager will absolutely, 100 percent take them in the right direction, or things could go very, very wrong at Anfield.
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