Why does this "Smith and Gerrard" thing get thrown around here regularly?
Because it's true and is also revealing of our transfer strategy over the last 3-4 years. Liverpool have won the league and changed half the team.
"9/11 players that effectively got Smith and Gerrard sacked" . Thats complete reactionary shite and ignores three successive seasons of European football achieved since under Emery.
Those same players were utterly mismanaged by that charlatan Gerrard and a sadly out of depth Smith. Sure, some of them might be on the slide now but bringing two previous coaches into the mix is nonsense.
The main reason we are on the slide isn't down to any of these players anyway. It's because as a club we were living way beyond our means chasing CL football. We handed over the keys to Emery who brought in his mates like Monchi who rather than running a tight ship did the exact opposite. Last January, despite "winning the transfer window" , we brought in 5 players, two of which we couldn't even register for CL football. Emery lost Malen then I think.
For all we know (and likely could come out shortly), the club have been trying to shop many of that core group of players around. No wonder they seem pissed off. Emery can hardly play the innocent victim in all this either. He's doing himself no favours with the group with the blatant favouritism he is showing to Rogers either.