--- title: "Review: Ben Lyttleton" canonical: "https://readliverpoolfc.com/columns/review-ben-lyttleton/" type: "post" language: "en-GB" author: "Ste Hoare" section: "Columns" published: "2013-05-24T08:45:45Z" modified: "2013-08-23T14:46:17Z" --- # Review: Ben Lyttleton **In the latest of our season review pieces with professional football writers, Ste Hoare caught up with Ben Lyttleton to discuss Liverpool’s 2012/13 season (Suarez bite and all!) as well as having a quick look at the Reds’ future under the management of Brendan Rodgers. To see more of Ben’s work, you can follow him on Twitter @Benlyt. Keep an eye out for the further interviews with professional writers coming up on our website in the near future**. **Well, we might as well get straight into it! Why have Liverpool been so inconsistent this season? At times they’ve looked like world beaters but at other times we’ve looked awful. Do you have any thoughts on why Liverpool have been so ‘up and down’?** You can excuse the inconsistency as the team gets used to playing under Rodgers and everyone realises the team, and the whole club in fact, is in transition. Rodgers might have thought that playing his ‘passing game’ might have brought more success early on but in the second half of the season, Liverpool seemed to play more direct, and were certainly helped by Coutinho and Sturridge, and Henderson finding some form. **Steven Gerrard recently said if Liverpool had signed Daniel Sturridge and Phillipe Coutinho at the start of the season rather than in January then they’d have been “right up there among the top four.” Do you agree with him?** Absolutely not. This kind of comment winds me up because it raises expectations of the fans once again; in the second half of the season, Liverpool still lost at home to WBA, lost at Southampton, failed to beat Reading (crazy goalkeeper performance I know) and didn’t score at home to West Ham. They won 10 of their last 18 games, which is a good record, though Arsenal, who finished fourth, won 12; and if those two had joined last summer, the team would still have had Rodgers-related teething problems. On top of that, the reason Sturridge didn’t join on the last day of the August window was purely down to Rodgers. He wanted Dempsey, not Sturridge, who was all set for Liverpool, and somehow the move broke down and Rodgers was able to blame the board for it (a good source told me it was Rodgers and not the board who screwed it up). **Jamie Carragher started the season on the bench and in Liverpool’s Europa League squad and has ended the season as a regular in the first team, having decided to retire somewhere in the middle. Knowing that Jamie was retiring, do you think Rodgers should have used Martin Skrtel more? I ask as we may need to replace both Jamie and Martin if he believes this season has shown his manager has little faith in him?** Not necessarily but it seemed obvious (to me anyway) that Rodgers was scapegoating Skrtel for the Oldham defeat. Is that mature or sensible for a manager to do? Okay, it allowed Carragher a beautiful swansong which he fully deserved – and he actually played well – while Skrtel played two Premier League matches over the next four months, or something like that. If I was Skrtel I would look to move on too, and he is a very good defender who could play for a top side; that said, Papadopoulos, who Liverpool have been linked with, is a great player and if that deal goes through, he is an upgrade on both Carragher and Skrtel. Kolo Toure, not so much… **Do you think Luis Suarez would have won the FWA Player of the Year if he didn’t mistake Branaslav Ivanovic’s arm for a sandwich – and what have you made of his performances this year?** No I don’t think he would have won it anyway, so it’s not because of the arm-bite that he missed out. Though again, that feeds into the Gerrard mentality of a convenient excuse. When the vote was taken, there was a chance that Gareth Bale would have taken Spurs into the top four. His nearest challenger was of course Van Persie, who scored 26 goals and helped United win the title. Suarez I would say is third on that list, because he scored 20 goals and Liverpool finished… 7th. Even Benteke, for example, scored the goals that effectively kept Villa in the Premier League. That’s the difference for me. Having said that, Suarez does have a popularity issue outside of Liverpool (i.e he isn’t) and that was true before the bite. Bale is Welsh, and RVP almost English he’s been here so long – Fernando Duarte wrote an interesting piece suggesting that his Latin American ethnicity is a problem for him; but that’s not the case for David Luiz, for example. But it can happen. Suarez is of course a brilliant player, in the top 5 in the league, and once again how well Liverpool do next season depends on whether they can keep him for next season or not.. **Finally, how do you think Brendan Rodgers has done in his first season as Liverpool manager? Any major positives or negatives, and what do you think he will have learned that’ll help him in the future?** First lesson: don’t do any more TV documentaries. Goodness me, he needed some time to get over Being:Liverpool and even now, people still talk to me about those three names in the envelope and the big picture of him in his house. He did make some mistakes, I’m sure he would admit that. The first was in the transfer market. I have told you before, I did not take it as a good sign that his first two transfers were players he already knew, Joe Allen and Borini –when you are a new coach and your power is at its peak, these are the two players he signed? I was surprised at that, they suggested to me a lack of confidence and need of security. He did handle the Suarez bite saga very well, so maybe has learned a bit about crisis management. But I still think of those damn envelopes when I see him talking, and imagine the players looking at each other going, ‘What’s he on about now?!’ The good news is there is room for progress, and I can see it happening next season. The bad news is that it might be from 7th place to 6th place. At least that’s in the right direction – but I’m not sure if it will be enough to convince FSG that Rodgers is the man for the long-term…