Brendan Rodgers’ Liverpool career began in one of football’s outposts, against the Belarusians Gomel in an eminently forgettable encounter in the qualifying rounds of the Europa League.
Tonight, he takes charge in the day’s most glamorous game, against the continent’s biggest club.
Real Madrid against Liverpool feels like the culmination of a journey from obscurity to centre stage for a manager whose rise has been swift and startling.
It also threatens to be embarrassing, given Liverpool’s wretched recent form and Real’s assortment of devastatingly incisive attacking talents.
The feeling is that Liverpool are at a crossroads and that Rodgers’s reign is at a turning point.
It seems preposterous to be questioning the recipient of the latest manager of the year award, yet the numbers doing that are increasing.
Liverpool’s utterly unpredictable, undeniably thrilling title challenge last season – they scored a club record 101 goals – was all the more admirable because few expected it.
Rodgers revealed himself to be a gifted coach of attacking players, an inventive tactician and a manager who helped different players reach new heights.
He may not have won the league but, having been given a three-year target of returning Liverpool to the Uefa Champions League, he achieved it 12 months early.
Rodgers inherited a team that had limped home in eighth place in 2012. They are seventh now, but that disguises the uplift in the meantime.
Yet, the current concern is the speed with which everything is unravelling at Anfield and, while it is not all Rodgers’ fault, he appears a common denominator.
Having displayed a golden touch with tactics and team selections in the second half of last season, he has lost it this year.
Line-ups have been strange and unsuccessful, choices have backfired and Rodgers’s attempts at squad rotation have been unconvincing.
Most unusually, he seemed to run out of ideas in September’s defeat to Aston Villa.
More characteristically, though, his team still cannot defend, which has been a recurring theme in his regime.
Meanwhile, there is a growing gulf between rhetoric and results.
The plight of the ever-positive manager is that he appears out of touch when his glowing appraisal of players or proceedings differs from those of the realists and many of Rodgers’s appraisals have been rose tinted.
Performances have proved mediocre with Liverpool having played genuinely well only once this season – at Tottenham Hotspur in August – and it feels a long time ago.
The subsequent slump cannot just be explained by the sale of Luis Suarez and the injuries to Daniel Sturridge, unfortunate as they were to lose one goalscorer so soon after another’s departure.
The bare facts are that Liverpool’s specialist strikers contributed 52 league goals last season and have mustered a solitary one in this campaign.
Rodgers’s skilled man-management of Suarez stands in contrast, too, to the way Mario Balotelli has been hung out to dry.
The Italian is almost presented by his manager as the unwanted signing, the panic buy Liverpool were left with when others eluded them.
Balotelli has been both a smokescreen and a recruit who has shone a light on transfer dealings in the Rodgers years.
In total, 24 players have arrived at Anfield since his 2012 appointment and only two – Sturridge and Philippe Coutinho – are unqualified successes.
If the jury remains out on many others and Liverpool’s transfer committee account for some of the dealings, it is still an unacceptably poor ratio.
This summer’s £117 million (Dh687m) spree on nine newcomers is looking a case of importing quantity, not quality.
Left-back Alberto Moreno, who was looking the best addition, was horribly culpable for Newcastle United’s winner on Saturday.
There is another element in the criticisms of Rodgers, which is the theory that success has gone to his head – and in a city where they appreciate down-to-earth characters.
Certainly both football and society have changed since the days when Bob Paisley, the Liverpool manager who led the team between 1974 and 1983, would conquer Europe while pottering around in old slippers and a deeply unfashionable cardigan when at home.
Paisley never particularly wanted to manage Liverpool but ended up as the most successful manager in the history of the European Cup.
Rodgers qualified Liverpool for the competition for the first time in five years and then antagonised some on Merseyside, before the first game against Real, with the tactless way he suggested his ambition is to manage in Spain.
The ultimate for those with Anfield allegiances is to lead Liverpool.
Rodgers has done so brilliantly at times, but badly at others. His reputation rose dramatically and deservedly, but it may be declining.
The task is to show he is no one-season wonder, that he has the attributes to be a constant on the major stage and that he is the manager to take on Real Madrid, not Gomel.
sports@thenational.ae
