Brendan Rodgers Must Now Prove His Worth by Fixing Liverpool

At times last season, it felt like a brave new era for Liverpool. They had a collection of good young players, a young manager playing attractive football and the goodwill of their fans very much behind them.

How long ago that feels now. When they collapsed at last, there was a sense that they had missed their chance, that Liverpool were always going to struggle to maintain their position at the top of the table, with Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal and Manchester United all sure to improve.

However, few thought that it would be this bad, that Liverpool would approach the end of November just four points off the relegation zone and a whopping 18 behind league leaders Chelsea already.

And the irony is that if they'd managed to maintain even some of last season's form, then they would have been challenging at the top of the table. Such is the current state of basically every team in the division apart from Chelsea and, implausibly, Southampton.

Sunday's defeat to Crystal Palace was a low point, and as ESPN's Iain Macintosh pointed out, in real terms it is more damaging to Liverpool than their notorious collapse at Selhurst Park last season.

Then, when they gave up a three-goal lead and drew their penultimate game of the season instead of winning it and drawing level with Manchester City on points, their situation didn't change a huge amount. Even if they had won that game, they would still have been faced with a virtually insurmountable goal difference deficit, and City were never likely to lose at home to West Ham on the final day. Liverpool lost their chance of winning the league when they were beaten by Chelsea—a combination of Steven Gerrard's slip, Jose Mourinho's "pragmatism" and the rest of their team freezing under pressure condemned them to "nearly" status.

That game felt like a freak occurrence, three quick goals that probably wouldn't happen again if they tried, but the most troubling thing about Saturday was that it almost felt expected, that Liverpool losing to a side whose first priority is survival wasn't a massive surprise.

Brendan Rodgers outlined the problems after the game, as quoted by ESPN FC:

You've seen a team low on confidence today, not quite together as a team. We need to find a solution very quickly, because it was very disappointing.

I put the team out there, the best team to win us the game. We made a good start. You could see our passing was a wee bit tentative and then we make mistakes -- mistakes you wouldn't expect to see at a team that's supposed to be challenging.

Overall, that intensity and togetherness in our game isn't there. When you don't get the results, that affects you. We have to work harder, but we go away bitterly disappointed with the result. At this moment, we're just not good enough.

Bold words, but this is where we will find out if Rodgers is as good a manager as last season suggested he is. He now has a huge problem to fix, so while any talk of him losing his job is premature (talk which he himself has fuelled, as per The Guardian), he will have to turn things around pretty quickly if he is to be in charge next season.

Still, if nothing else, Saturday's defeat proved that Mario Balotelli is not the biggest problem in the Liverpool side. Of course, he has been enormously disappointing since his summer move from AC Milan, and his replacement Rickie Lambert scored and generally performed acceptably, but the form/ability of Simon Mignolet, the defence and Steven Gerrard all rank comfortably above Balotelli in Rodgers' and Liverpool's problems.

To put a positive spin on things, as he surely would, this is an opportunity for Rodgers to prove himself as one of the top managers in the country. Time will tell whether he takes that opportunity.