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It was at 7.34 PM on Saturday, precisely eight minutes after the match had ended, that an email landed from a well-known bookmakers offering odds of 9-1 on Liverpool’s manager, Brendan Rodgers, being sacked before the end of the season. The email’s heading was: “Could Rodgers Be On His Way?” and the obvious answer from anyone exasperated with football’s thirst for knee-jerk reactions has to be “No, don’t be so ridiculous”.

Liverpool were undoubtedly poor against West Ham and three defeats in five fixtures is a disappointing start for a club with title-winning aspirations. But these remain early days and Rodgers remains the man who led them to second place last campaign on the back of consistently thrilling, goal-laden displays. If his position really is under threat, then heaven help practically every other manager working in this country.

The focus instead needs to be on how Rodgers plans to get his team out of their rut and he was honest enough to admit they had “no excuses” for their showing in east London, which, coming on the back of the 1-0 home defeat by Aston Villa, means Liverpool have lost consecutive league matches for the first time since December. And given those fixtures came before and after Liverpool’s first Champions League contest in five years – last Tuesday’s 2-1 win against Ludogorets – there is a wider concern, specifically that coping with a return to Europe’s elite competition is directly affecting the club’s domestic campaign.

When this was put to Rodgers he was again in no mood to look for excuses, making the point that Liverpool were revelling in being back “at the leading edge of the game”. He did, however, concede that being in the Champions League is likely to prove “mentally draining” for his squad and, for coaches and players alike, has already forced a huge disruption of the routine which served them so well last season.

“You’ve got a lot less time working,” he said. “If you play on the Saturday, you’ve got Sunday/Monday for recovery. You’ve then got the Tuesday game and then the players who play are recovering Wednesday/Thursday. So you’re doing your first tactical preparation on the Friday and then you’re travelling straight down to the next game. It’s a tiring competition.”

These are not wholly uncharted waters for Rodgers, given he had to cope with the demands of the Europa League during the 2012-13 season, his first in charge at Anfield. Worryingly for Liverpool supporters, the team won only three of the 11 Premier League fixtures which followed European ties in that campaign. There are key differences between then and now, of course, namely that Liverpool are a far-improved side. Once the summer signings have firmly bedded in, and Daniel Sturridge has returned from injury, they should have a squad more capable of coping with playing games home and abroad in quick succession.

Patience is required, then, but given Liverpool’s start to the season, and with a Merseyside derby on Saturday, Rodgers’s men simply cannot afford an instant repeat of their display against West Ham, when they found themselves 2-0 down inside seven minutes through Winston Reid’s close-range header and a superb chip from Diafra Sakho. Liverpool were slow, sloppy and out of sorts and even after regaining their composure after an excellent goal from Raheem Sterling, they rarely looked like getting back on level terms. All hopes of a comeback were truly snuffed out when Morgan Amalfitano, on as a substitute, struck two minutes from the end.

The biggest worry for Rodgers with regard to juggling domestic and European commitments is that West Ham saw them coming.
“We did a high press based on knowing Liverpool had been in the Champions League and it was such a big game for them, emotionally and physically,” said their manager, Sam Allardyce. “Most of the team that played in that game played here so we thought they would want to control the tempo, get it slow to begin with and feel their way into the game.

“Maybe they were a little jaded and when you get into the game as quick as we did it clearly caught them by surprise.”
Rodgers made three changes from the team that beat Ludogorets and there was a clear lack of zip in their play. There was also a lack of defensive organisation, something that has hampered the team for some time. The record shows one clean sheet for Liverpool in their last 12 games spanning two seasons, with this the second match in succession in which they have conceded from a set piece. It took just 72 seconds for Stewart Downing to cause havoc in his former side’s backline with a free-kick that, via James Tomkins, was easily converted into an open net by Reid.

“We’ll need to put extra work into defending set-pieces,” conceded Rodgers. “We do a lot of preparation on our organisation and we’ll have to analyse that more, no doubt.”
Plenty of work ahead, then, for the manager and his team, who after facing Middlesbrough in the Capital One Cup on Tuesday, take on Everton and travel to Basel in a stern test of their abilities to manage Premier League and Champions League expectations. For Liverpool the aim is not to become victims of their own success. — The Guardian