Liverpool sack was huge fear, says Rodgers

The manager says defeat to Crystal Palace in November prompted him to change his approach, with the Reds now the Premier League's in-form team in 2015

Liverpool manager Brendan Rodgers admits he feared he was going to lose his job at Anfield earlier this season.

The Reds finished as Premier League runners-up last year but struggled in the early part of 2014-15 following the sale of Luis Suarez to Barcelona and the injury woes suffered by Daniel Sturridge.

Rodgers concedes that he feared for his job after a 3-1 defeat to Crystal Palace back in November - their fourth consecutive defeat in all competitions at the time - and says the defeat to the Eagles prompted him to change his approach.

"After that Palace game I felt that it doesn't matter how much support you have, the team is not functioning and it could not go on really," he told reporters.

"But I certainly wasn't going to roll over and die. I will always fight for my life. I love it here and I want to be successful here.

"I understood the situation. My experience at Reading told me that. That's what I learned from my sacking there. I went into Reading with the full backing of the chairman, who was great to me, and I got 20 games.

"Even though it was a three-year project  and I was the guy who knew the club more than anyone, I got the sack after 20 games. Funnily enough it had just started to pick up but they lost their patience.

"What I learned was it does not matter how much support you have in the boardroom, from the directors, the executives, you have to get results and you have to win."
Liverpool have subsequently gone 11 games unbeaten in the Premier League, defeating champions Manchester City at the weekend, and Rodgers says he should have made changes earlier.

"I needed to make decisions that would allow us to get back to somewhere near what we had been and the transformation of the team, with everyone talking about the system and how dynamic it is, has been good to see. I should have done it earlier!" he explained.

"We had no identity and everyone could see it. We just weren't the team I had built over a couple of years. It was not working and of course that can eat away at you.

"I knew I had to do something radical because I had seen enough of the players to know we were not going to shape up and work as we had done for the previous couple of years with what we had got."