Brendan Rodgers: Reading Between The Lines

The journey of life is one of self improvement. That constant strive toward bettering oneself, with no real end in sight. Perfection as a concept may be unattainable and yet because it's relative it has become no more than a stock phrase.  Not a ninety minutes passes without someone executing what is decscribed as the perfect through ball.  More often than not the striker misses, or hits the post if it's Liverpool.  These are all notions defined by us and can be as diverse and contradictory as we are. Everybody makes mistakes.  In no other industry however are those mistakes held against you quite so personally as the world professional sport. Just ask any referee.

While most people of his age were acquainting themselves with the local Weatherspoons, Brendan Rodgers was coaching the Reading youth team at just twenty three. Determined to scale the heights as a coach that he was never able to as a player, he left for Chelsea in 2005 and built upon his tag as one of Britain's best up and coming coaches by studying abroad. His first real crack at management came at Watford and after a difficult introduction into the life of a football manager - winning only two of his first ten - Rodgers found a way to turn it around and ended the season in thirteenth place. It was then that the opportunity of a lifetime came along. To go back to the club he had been with fleetingly as a player and who had enabled him to cut his teeth as a coach. "Brendan is the perfect fit for Reading Football Club," said Reading chairman John Madejski upon his appointment in June of 2009. So what went wrong?

The numbers read like a Stephen King novel. Eleven defeats in twenty three league games. Five victories over the course of nearly two hundred days in charge and only one of those at home. To put that number into perspective, Roy Hodgson had five wins at home during his time in charge of Liverpool - and he had a few days less than Rodgers. Before anyone starts to panic however, remember one thing. Stats only told half the story. It wasn't just about the wins and losses for the soon to be harangued England manager, it was his entire demeanour. The same is true of our current manager, in that as soon as you start to scratch the surface it becomes very clear that the numbers are as misleading as a quote from Dave Whelan.

First of all, let's take a look as a whole at the state of Reading Football Club when Brendan Rodgers arrived. They had finished six points off automatic promotion play-offs in fourth place and scored the joint second most goals in the Championship, a more than reasonable platform for someone to build upon. Top scorer Kevin Doyle and veteran goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann both went to Wolves shortly after his arrival and they would be followed shortly after by Stephen Hunt. André Bikey, former captain Graeme Murty and Leroy Lita would also leave the club that summer but of the three only Bikey was finding regular playing time during Steve Coppell's final season. Money to bring in new recruits was in short supply with Reading opting to use their parachute payment the season prior in retaining most of it's Premier League squad. If he was going to meet the demands - which sounds a little harsh but there will have been given expectation - of promotion then he needed to hit the ground running. That didn't happen.

Despite having his hands tied by a high wage bill, Brendan was active in the transfer market. Matt Mills came in for two million, Jobi McAnuff for three hundred thousand and players like Grzegorz Rasiak, Brian Howard and Ryan Bertrand came in on loan. It appears that what Rodgers had on his hands was a team trying to balance the expectations of gunning for promotion while trying to cut back some of the money in failing to do so previously. In addition to this he will have seen first hand the young talent we now know existed at Reading at the time. Both Alex Pearce and Adam Federici played during Rodger's tenure and were also vital parts of the team that has just won promotion, the latter having gone on to becoming Mark Schwarzer's back up for Australia. Also, let's not forget one Glyfi Sigurdsson who we may be seeing an awful lot of very soon. This talented bunch of youngsters coupled with a management style based with intensive attacking football had the potential to light up the Championship. Unfortunately for them, it was "sink or swim" football and they weren't quite ready for it yet.

By late October, Reading were in the midst of a four game losing streak that saw them in the relegation zone. Their form picked up, taking ten points from their next five games but another three games without a win saw Brendan Rodgers leave the club on the 16th of December. He wasn't necessarily the wrong man but it was certainly the wrong time - both for he and the Royals. Going back to a more direct style of football suited them and given what's happened since nobody can really say that it was a bad decision for either party but it did appear that he may have turned the corner. Six months passed and the once golden child of British coaching - touched by the hand of Mourinho himself - found that he was left with a seemingly immovable stain on his record. When the Swansea job became available after Paulo Sousa's departure he wasn't on anybody's list of top candidates, including the chairman Huw Jenkins. Paul Tisdale, Gareth Southgate, Gary Speed and even Graeme Jones were all considered for the job but for one reason or another didn't end up at the Liberty Stadium. This time he had a point to prove.

Given a twelve month rolling contract as opposed to the implied security of the three year deal Rodgers was given at Reading, there wasn't much time for reinventing the wheel. It's naturally assumed that what happened at Swansea was a case of adding the finishing touches to Martinez's work but again there's a little more to it than that. Though they achieved their highest ever finish for over a quarter of a century, the style of football didn't exactly endear himself to the Swansea faithful. Missing out on the play-offs wasn't so much heartbreak as it was frustration. They had been in either forth or fifth from December until late April and were defensively very solid but simply couldn't find the net, especially at home where the Swans ended up scoring only twenty one goals in twenty three games. Remind you of anyone?

What's noticeable - even before a ball was kicked - is the absence of a big money transfer. Championship clubs often walk a fine line with their finances and have to make do with free transfers. Not having a war chest ready for an assault on promotion, if things were going to work then it was clear he would have to be a lot more savvy than at The Madjeski. For one reason or another having spent two million bringing Matt Mills to Reading from Doncaster, Rodgers only played the defender seven times. This time around money was going to be a lot more scarce and there would be no room for gambling. With that in mind, it's not too hard to understand why he went looking where he did. Enter Scott Sinclair.

When things eventually got under way, results were mixed. After the heartbreak of the previous year coupled with the club having it's third manager in two years, nobody could have expected what was about to happen. Although Swansea lost three of their first six, they would then go on to lose just one of ten. It would take Rodgers just fourteen games to eclipse his points tally at Reading as everything seemed to come together. One thing that's very clear is that the rotation was a lot tighter, employing just fourteen different starting players over the first five games (as opposed to nineteen with Reading). In fact, eight of the starting eleven that began game number one played all five. There was also one massive difference between the team he had and the one he had left. Swansea's team may have been filled with young potential, but it was also much more experienced. Players from lower league clubs who had been plying their trade from an early age and were hungry to climb the ladder. Sinclair for instance was 21 when the season started and he had already wracked up seventy two appearances. Nathan Dyer was a year older and had over a hundred. To illustrate both these points, I've taken the top ten most used players from both teams and sorted them by their age when Rodgers first had them and also the games they had been a part of up until that point. Swansea's team collectively was just over a year older and on average had played more than forty games more than their Reading counterparts. Inexperience cost him at the Madejski but this time Brendan was able to put together a young team that was not only physically suited to playing his style of football but one that had the know how to implement it.

Last year we looked on in envy. Like a child with it's head pressed up against the glass of a toy store window just before Christmas, Brendan Rodgers was on everyone's list. Now that we've opened the wrapping paper, we should be careful not to discard or break him. The idea that we've all got out knives out and are collective waiting - willing - him to fail is about as laughable as it is inaccurate. It's important not to get carried away too much in either direction at the moment, neither calls of crisis nor mindless grandstanding will do him any favours regardless of results. Patience is the one word everyone is tired of hearing because it's the only one worth saying. Rodgers will save his words for the training ground. The strive for perfection continues.