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Brendan Rodgers far from finished with 'dropping hand grenades' at established order ahead of Arsenal visit

Brendan Rodgers has every right to have both thumbs up having led Leicester to third in the Premier League playing entertaining football - PA
Brendan Rodgers has every right to have both thumbs up having led Leicester to third in the Premier League playing entertaining football - PA

The challenge, as Brendan Rodgers sees it, for a club outside the elite like Leicester City is never to stop fighting to break in and then see how far that fight takes them – or as he puts it “drop a hand grenade in” to affect the established order of English football.

Rodgers is back in the English football, and while the effect may not yet have been explosive it is already disruptive. Just nine months at the King Power and Leicester are third in the Premier League, breaking goalscoring records at Southampton and playing the style of football that warrants five minutes of pundit admiration on Match of the Day. When Rodgers is also told at his media briefing on Thursday that his team have made more tackles than any top flight side in Europe, bar Metz in Ligue 1, his expression barely flickers. Maybe he already knows.

He faces Unai Emery on Saturday who is just six points worse off but in a different world when it comes to outside perception. Arsenal’s manager is fighting for his future. Rodgers’ stock could scarcely be higher. He is two years Emery’s junior and there are similarities – no major playing career, a meteoric rise, big club jobs early. The question most commonly being asked now is whether Arsenal made a mistake in the summer of last year by appointing Emery and overlooking the value in Rodgers that Leicester subsequently grasped in February.

In the summer of 2016 it was different. Emery’s three Europa League titles at Seville earned him the Paris Saint-German job. That same summer Rodgers, sacked at Liverpool in the previous October and generally out of favour, accepted the Celtic job. Emery was sacked by PSG; Rodgers was a hero at Celtic but the level of job open to both in the Premier League tells you all you need to know about perceptions of them. An “outstanding coach” is how Rodgers describes Emery. “If you get the opportunity to work with top players and great players you have a greater chance to win trophies,” he says, and on the whole he is reluctant to draw comparisons.

Then later we return to the point. Could Rodgers’s success change perceptions of British and Irish managers? This time there is something he wants to say, the first being that most British managers are only given jobs when a club is in trouble. Others have to get a club promoted from the Championship before they are even considered worthy of being judged against the elite, and Rodgers says the Championship in itself is one of the hardest challenges he has faced. He also has an observation on the way British managers are perceived.

Leicester have been playing exciting football, thanks in part to the attacking trio of Jamie Vardy, Youri Tielmans and Ayoze Perez - Credit: Getty Images
Leicester have been playing exciting football, thanks in part to the attacking trio of Jamie Vardy, Youri Tielmans and Ayoze Perez Credit: Getty Images

“We have many outstanding [British] coaches, managers, innovators. We are not showmen on the side [touchline]. That’s definitely what we are not. Or as we come through in our lives it’s not how we are, it’s not how we work. We try to do honest jobs, work hard, develop our players, and we are not all-singing, all-dancing on the side. If you do probably you wouldn’t be as good at it as ...”

A joke is made about Alan Pardew’s touchline dancing, and Rodgers laughs. He says he has “big respect for the European guys”, that they bring something different and if you get an opportunity you have to take it. But the question is left hanging in the air: who was he talking about?

It took a bit of persuading in February for the Leicester board, still recovering in the aftermath of owner Vichai Srivaddhanaprabha’s death, to pay the kind of salary it takes to get a coach of Rodgers’ quality. They had never really invested in that way before, and along with the £8.5 million compensation to Celtic, it felt like a lot of money. Not anymore. The club has had other successes too, outside of Rodgers’ aegis, including the excellent recruitment department which by last season had assembled a squad crying out for a coach to get the best out of them.

In the summer they wanted to buy James Tarkowski and were willing to spend as much as £40 million of the Harry Maguire sale on the Burnley centre-back. But the price was too high so they decided to put their faith in Caglar Soyuncu. He has turned out to be one of the league’s breakout players. The deal for Youri Tielemans was in place too. Rodgers inherited a strong group of senior players, chief among them Jamie Vardy who was totally disenchanted with Claude Puel and desperate for change.

Vardy is now the Premier League’s top goalscorer. The captain from the title-winning side of 2016, Wes Morgan, has been retained as one of those strong dressing room influences. Those senior players, including Marc Albrighton, count for a lot. The academy has yielded Ben Chilwell, Hamza Choudhury and Harvey Barnes and it is hoped the 20-year-old South African midfielder Khanya Leshabela will be the next. Many of the pieces were there but it needed a coach capable of galvanising them quickly.

Unai Emery the manager of Arsenal FC reacts after Bruno Duarte of Vitoria Guimaraes SC scored a goal during the UEFA Europa League group F match between Vitoria Guimaraes and Arsenal FC - Credit: Getty Images
Unai Emery is doubtless feeling under siege and not just from the weather at the moment, with Arsenal fans openingly questioning whether he is the right man to lead the Gunners Credit: Getty Images

How quickly? It is a question for Emery too, as patience wears thin. What parallels can Rodgers draw with the Liverpool of 2012 that he inherited? The first thing he points out is that then Liverpool had been outside the Champions League for two seasons going on three rather than just one going on two for Arsenal when Emery took over. Rodgers says he had to cut £30 million from the budget and find a playing style to suit those who remained. Only when Daniel Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho arrived did it gradually started to feel more like his team.

“Arsenal is one of those big institutions … you have got to go in and you have got to be able to lead,” Rodgers says. “Have no fear of bringing your vision to the club.” He reflects on the patience of fans, that they will understand there will be “tough days” and if a manager can demonstrate improvement then that buys him time. He acknowledges that at Arsenal that dynamic is not so simple. “They [the fans] were given a few years back, ‘Let’s wait for the stadium [financing to be resolved] and then we can hopefully push on from there’ …”

Has Rodgers already won his battle for acceptance? It seems unlikely that a manager this ambitious would every settle. “You can’t accept that it is the top six in terms of money and finance and you are always going to sit below it,” he says. That is when he mentions the hand grenade he intends to drop, and who knows where the aftershock might take his club, and him.