Suarez sale to blame for nosedive since title charge

Only one was brought out about the actual champions, Manchester City, and it is certainly a strange set of events that there was a full summer's worth of reading about the club where Bill Shankly's old prophecy about first being first and second being nowhere is almost as much a part of the history as the Anfield gates.

The first was released 10 days after the final game of the season. The next was six days later, followed by three more in June, two in July and one in August. Two have the same title, Make us Dream, not to be confused with Daring to Dream, or indeed They Dared to Dream. Another takes its name, We Go Again, from the line Steven Gerrard used after beating City, and there is something rather quaint about the one that goes by the straightforward title, A Surprising Season. All tell the story of Luis Suarez bludgeoning defences and the exhilaration when everything started to fall into place. And what a story it was in those days and weeks when the bus was inching through the throngs outside the stadium and Anfield, once again, felt like the place to be.

None, though, has a happy ending. Liverpool will be reminded of that today when they return to Selhurst Park, the scene of so much sporting desolation the last time they played Crystal Palace that when the television cameras panned away from Suarez, sobbing beneath his shirt, they picked out a Liverpool Echo reporter in the stand. He, too, was in tears.

A fortnight ago, the opposition was Chelsea, bringing another set of raw memories, and perhaps the most conclusive evidence yet that Gerrard has not been the same player since his ordeal the previous time they met. Brendan Rodgers was booed for making unpopular substitutions and, even with two-thirds of the season to go, it would need a particularly vivid imagination to see how Liverpool can possibly stop themselves now from reaching 25 years without a league title.

Liverpool, in other words, are then on course to equal, and probably surpass, Manchester United's record from 1967 to 1993. The difference, unfortunately for them, is they have just sold the player who offered them what Eric Cantona did for Alex Ferguson.

This is certainly a delicate moment for Rodgers, but, even by the standards of the modern game, it seems faintly preposterous that press releases have started arriving from various bookmakers announcing that he and Manuel Pellegrini, the top two in the league last season, are moving up the betting shop chalkboards in the running to be the next managerial casualty. Let us have some common sense here. Rodgers was named manager of the year in May. To go from that kind of position to being told his job is suddenly in danger feels like football at its knee-jerking worst.

Yet managers, like players, go through periods of good, bad and indifferent form and here's a statistic to make you think: did you realise that Rodgers has won 52.63 per cent of his games at Liverpool, whereas David Moyes's win ratio with United was 52.94 per cent?

At the same time, take a considered look at Liverpool's signings in the Rodgers era. Daniel Sturridge, despite his luckless run with injuries, can be filed with Philippe Coutinho as good buys, and Alberto Moreno looks an accomplished left-back. Yet it is a thin file. Adam Lallana, Emre Can and Javier Manquillo are entitled to more time, but Dejan Lovren and Lazar Markovic have started their Liverpool careers in a way that makes them look dreadfully overpriced. Joe Allen is a more rounded player than many perceive, but Gazzetta dello Sport probably called it right after Real Madrid had left their calling card at Anfield, describing him as "inadequate at this level".

Then consider Iago Aspas, Luis Alberto, Aly Cissokho, Mamadou Sakho, Nuri Sahin, Samed Yesil, Tiago Ilori, Victor Moses and Oussama Assaidi. Kolo Toure and Simon Mignolet are too erratic for a club with Liverpool's ambitions. And what of Mario Balotelli, Rickie Lambert and Fabio Borini, three strikers who have played 998 minutes of league football this season and not managed a single goal?

Hypothetical now, of course, but it is tempting to wonder if there are people at Anfield who now suspect it might have been worth putting up with the hassles that come with Suarez rather than waving through his transfer to Barcelona.

Yes, he frequently offered the impression that he was no more trustworthy than a rattlesnake that had removed its rattle. His offending was of the serial nature and it probably sums him up that the Premier League lost its best player in the summer and its chief executive, Richard Scudamore, still sounded glad to be shot of him.

Yet Suarez belongs to the small band of footballers who seem to be on first-name terms with the ball. And, briefly, he did make Liverpool's fans dare to dream. That's why Liverpool tried to become the first team to win 9-0 away in the history of the Premier League on that wild night at Selhurst. And when Suarez popped in the third goal, tucked the ball under his arm and sprinted back to the centre circle, the crazy thing is it wasn't utterly beyond the realms of possibility. He was a swine, but he was a brilliant swine, and the common assumption that he would have withdrawn his gifts and drifted resentfully to the edges had Liverpool pulled down the shutters on Barcelona is simply incorrect.

Suarez, remember, is the guy whose foot was broken, growing up in Montevideo, when a car ran over him, but carried on playing until the plaster cast was completely worn away at the heel. "I know what you are like, I know how you live," Rodgers told him after that dalliance with Arsenal the previous summer. Sure, Suarez was aggrieved and for a couple of months he and Rodgers barely exchanged a word, but he still gave absolutely everything on the pitch. As long as he had kept doing that, Liverpool would have been authentic challengers. The size of his grudge would have been irrelevant.

Instead, Balotelli's first few months at Anfield can probably be summed up by a moment of tragicomedy before the Chelsea game when his team-mates were going through the pre-match hugging and comradeship routine and he was out by the wing, staring into the middle distance, apparently oblivious to what was going on in the centre circle.

Sturridge's injury record makes it legitimate to wonder if he will always be undermined by physical shortcomings and, as for Gerrard, it is starting to feel as if Liverpool's captain might have been jarred more than we know by the way everything unravelled last season. One thing Gerrard does not lack is competitive courage. He can, however, be tremendously hard on himself and his story is so entwined with Liverpool's it is virtually impossible to think he has got it out of his system.

Gerrard does not deserve trial by Opta, but the number crunchers can show you he has made fewer tackles, goals, interceptions and runs this season. One statistic in particular leaps out. Gerrard regularly covered 11km in matches last season. This season, he has not run that far once. He is 35 on his next birthday and age catches up with everyone in the end, especially when there are other statistics that show the Premier League is 20 per cent faster now than in 2007.

Liverpool, in turn, have lost their control of matches and Rodgers has started talking up performances that, plainly, have not merited such acclaim. Liverpool, apparently, were desperately unfortunate to lose to Madrid at the Bernabeu (the truth: Liverpool did not manage a single shot until 10 minutes into the second half). Rodgers took a similar line against Chelsea and the deception was obvious again. It is an old managerial trick, designed to manipulate the headlines and it is as see-through as it is unoriginal.

The reality is that Liverpool have lost all their forward momentum. Southampton, having banked two-thirds of the Suarez money for Lallana, Lovren and Lambert, must be sniggering behind their hands as they peer down the table from second place. Chelsea have become a speck in the distance and Liverpool are approaching a milestone they would never have thought possible when Alan Hansen lifted the trophy in 1990. And, from here, it is threatening to be an awfully long way back.

Observer