In hindsight, Brendan Rodgers must have known the end was near.
It was September 2015, about an hour after Liverpool had beaten Carlisle in the League Cup at Anfield.
It wasn’t a win to be proud of. Against League Two opposition, the Reds had required the lottery of a penalty shoot-out to secure progression. In 120 minutes, they’d had 47 shots and scored just once. They had been booed by their own supporters at half-time, at full-time and during an excruciating period of extra time. They’d also lost Dejan Lovren and Roberto Firmino to injury.
Yep, it was a bad night, not that you’d have known it from Rodgers’ demeanour, post-match.
“Evening, gents,” he smiled, encountering a handful of local reporters on his way out of the stadium. “Fun and games there, eh? Nice and exciting, though!”
His chirpiness was surprising, given the situation. Rodgers was a man under pressure. His side had not won any of their previous five matches and were 13th in the Premier League table. Speculation was rife that these were the final days of his Anfield reign.
They were, as it turned out.
After Carlisle, Rodgers would get just 10 more days as Liverpool manager. On October 4, 2015, following a 1-1 draw at Everton, he was called by Mike Gordon, the president of Fenway Sports Group, and told to attend a meeting with Ian Ayre, the chief executive, at Melwood.
He knew what was coming.
Liverpool were 10th in the Premier League table when Rodgers was sacked, and few questioned the wisdom of the club's decision. The team was going nowhere except backwards, and its relationship with supporters had deteriorated. Rodgers could still smile, occasionally at least, but Anfield was not a happy place.
How on earth did it unravel so quickly for him on Merseyside?
Just 18 months earlier, he had stood on the brink of Anfield immortality. He had saluted the jubilant Liverpool fans at Norwich knowing that three more games, seven more points, would end the club’s wait for a league championship. He'd never admit it, but that weekend in Norfolk, he thought he'd done it.
His team, unfancied at the start of the campaign, had won 11 straight games to go top of the table. Rodgers, in just his second season as Reds boss, was about to follow in the footsteps of the greats: Shankly, Paisley, Fagan and Dalglish.
He didn’t, of course. The week after that Norwich game, Jose Mourinho’s Chelsea came to Anfield, Steven Gerrard slipped, Demba Ba scored and nothing would ever be the same.
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Liverpool lost, and then threw away a 3-0 lead at Crystal Palace to draw their next game. They took 48 points from the last 57 available, but finished three behind Manchester City as runners-up.
The wait would go on. It is still going on.
There is a lot of revisionism surrounding that 2013-14 campaign, with plenty of people reluctant to give credit to a manager who fashioned a title challenge out of a team containing Simon Mignolet, Mamadou Sakho, Martin Skrtel, Jon Flanagan, Lucas Leiva and Joe Allen.
Sure, Rodgers had the brilliant Luis Suarez, who banged in 31 goals in 33 league games. He also had Daniel Sturridge in the form of his life. He had the league’s two top scorers to work with.
But he also coaxed excellence out of a teenage Raheem Sterling, reinvented an ageing Gerrard as a deep-lying playmaker, set Philippe Coutinho on the road to stardom and turned Jordan Henderson from an Anfield cast-off into a future captain. He made Flanagan a Premier League left-back, an England international.
His team scored 101 league goals that season. At Anfield, they stuck five past Arsenal, four past Everton and three, thrillingly, past Manchester City in what was billed as a title decider.
They went to Old Trafford and won 3-0, smashed Spurs for five at White Hart Lane and four at Anfield. They went up and down the country and played with a swagger. They made supporters dream. "Brendan Rodgers' Liverpool, we're on our way to glory," they sang.
“It was an incredible journey,” Rodgers reflected this week. “Wherever I go, when I meet Liverpool fans, they want to talk about that season.”
He’d arrived on Merseyside in the summer of 2012, the not-universally-popular choice to replace Dalglish in the Reds hotseat. Liverpool had won the League Cup and reached the FA Cup final the previous year but Dalglish, unfairly in many eyes, was sacked anyway.
The plan was for a younger, more dynamic coach, someone to give the club identity while working within a tightened budget. Roberto Martinez, who would go on to manage Everton, was the other candidate considered.
The first season was a struggle. Liverpool finished seventh, 28 points behind champions Manchester United. They exited the Europa League in the last 32 and made no progress in the domestic cups.
Rodgers, meanwhile, attracted derision in some quarters for his penchant for hyperbole and management speak. He christened Allen, a £15m signing from former club Swansea, "The Welsh Xavi" and spoke of another new recruit, Fabio Borini, as if he was a mix between Lionel Messi and Ian Rush.
He wasn't helped by the club's decision to allow Fox Soccer to screen a six-part fly-on-the-wall documentary series, which opened the new manager and his idiosyncracies to a worldwide audience. Being: Liverpool painted an image of Rodgers that has proven hard to shift
"It was something that I never really wanted to do and probably, in hindsight, it should never have been put onto a manager – especially a young manager," he would later admit.
On the pitch, though, the arrivals of Sturridge and Coutinho in the January 2013 window had made a difference. Sturridge, in particular, hit the ground running, with 11 goals in 16 games. Rodgers was proving himself to be an astute coach, whose sessions and ideas had players engaged and improving.
Going into 2013-14 Liverpool had, despite a summer dispute with Suarez, a sense of momentum.
That momentum took them close to the title, but good things rarely last. And having failed to scale Everest, Rodgers and Liverpool found themselves falling – and fast.
Suarez left in the summer of 2014, and Liverpool’s attempts to replace him failed. They missed out on Alexis Sanchez, a deal for Loic Remy fell through due to a medical issue, and the club refused to be held to ransom for Wilfried Bony. Rodgers signed a new four-year contract and was named LMA Manager of the Year, but his stock at Liverpool was only going in one direction.
In the end, he claims, he was left with two choices for a Suarez replacement – Mario Balotelli or a 33-year-old Samuel Eto’o. Rodgers had mocked the idea of signing Balotelli during Liverpool’s tour of America that summer, but a few weeks later the Italian was unveiled. “It was a gamble,” Rodgers later admitted, though at the time he claimed the club, who paid £16 million, had secured "a great deal."
Some gamble. Balotelli never looked a good fit at Anfield and would score just one league goal for the Reds. His behaviour around the training ground, meanwhile, provided an almost constant distraction. Pound-for-pound, he is one of the club's worst ever buys.
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Rodgers’ plans were thrown into further disarray when, days after the transfer window closed, Sturridge suffered an injury on international duty with England. Their star striker would be missing until January, and the heart of the team which had gone so close the previous season had been ripped out.
Liverpool had spent big money in the summer, buying the likes of Adam Lallana, Lazar Markovic, Lovren, Emre Can and Alberto Moreno, but with no reliable forward option, it wasn't long before they were going backwards.
Fans, who had dared to dream, were soon getting tetchy. The defeats started to mount, and Rodgers lost a healthy section of the supporters - as well as a couple of players - when Liverpool went to Real Madrid in a Champions League group game in November 2014.
That night, with one eye on an upcoming league game against Chelsea, he left out Gerrard, Henderson, Sterling, Coutinho and Balotelli. The news began to filter through on the day of the game, leaving supporters in the Spanish capital dumbfounded.
Understandable, too. They’d waited five years to get back into the Champions League, and wanted to see their team at least have a go at upsetting the big boys. Liverpool lost 1-0 in the Bernabeu and, with the star names restored, were beaten by Chelsea at the weekend anyway. Rodgers' cunning plan had proven anything but.
A winter revival, brought about by a switch to a 3-4-3 formation with Sterling as its striker, briefly brought fresh hope. Liverpool went 13 games unbeaten in the league, but Rodgers knew he could not hold back the tide forever.
“We lost our identity,” he admitted this week. “I was not watching a team playing in the way I believe in because we could not press high from the front."
The end of the 2014-15 season was painful. Rodgers left Gerrard out of a crucial home game with Manchester United at Anfield and then watched, helpless, as his furious captain came on at half-time and earned a straight red card within 60 seconds. A week later, his side were skelped 4-1 at Arsenal to leave their top-four bid in tatters.
Things would get even worse. Defeat to Tim Sherwood’s Aston Villa in the FA Cup semi-final at Wembley was bad enough, but the 6-1 humiliation at Stoke on the final day of the season was rock bottom.
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It was Gerrard’s last game for the club, and it ended as Liverpool’s worst defeat in 52 years. They were 5-0 down at half-time, abused by their own supporters as they left the field. Rodgers started with Can at right-back and Coutinho and Lallana as his front two. Sterling, who by then had made clear his desire to leave, was an unused substitute.
Afterwards Liverpool allowed Jordon Ibe to conduct post-match media duties with the club's website and TV channel. Ibe was 19 years old and had only been brought on at half-time, with his team five down. It was a dereliction of duty from senior players and staff, a complete slap in the face to supporters.
Rodgers had planned to take a helicopter to Wembley to watch his son, Anton, play for Swindon in the League One play-off final after that game. Wisely, he scrapped that idea. He wore the look of a broken man in his post-match press conference. He began it by issuing an apology to the fans.
He should, in truth, have been sacked then, but after a summit meeting with Gordon in Liverpool a few days later, he was given a stay of execution.
Others were not so lucky. Colin Pascoe, his long-serving assistant manager, and Mike Marsh, his first-team coach, were dismissed instead. Neither have spoken about it since, but it’s safe to say their relationship with Rodgers is over. Pascoe was informed of the news while on holiday.
The summer of 2015 was bizarre. Gerrard left for the LA Galaxy, having been unconvinced of the club's desire to keep him, while Sterling forced a transfer to Manchester City. Gary McAllister, Pep Lijnders and Sean O'Driscoll, the former Doncaster, Crawley and Bristol City manager, were added to Rodgers' staff.
Rodgers' relationship with the press had turned - he was on a self-imposed media ban during the summer tour of Australia and the Far East, believing he had been subjected to unfair criticism from those who covered the club day in and day out - but his relationship with the club's recruitment team was even more fraught and even more damaging.
He clashed with Michael Edwards, who is now the sporting director but who then was the head of technical performance, over potential targets, and seemed unwilling or unable to work with players he had not suggested himself.
History suggests Edwards' eye for a player was better than Rodgers', in fairness. Rodgers suggested Ryan Bertrand and Ashley Williams, Gylfi Sigurdsson and Clint Dempsey, Tom Ince and Bony. None were signed. The club, meanwhile, failed to convince the likes of Henrikh Mkhitaryan, Willian and Diego Costa to join.
It became farcical. Edwards and his team brought in Firmino from Hoffenheim that summer believing him to be an ideal solution as a high-pressing No.9. Rodgers agreed to the deal, only on the understanding that he could also bring in Christian Benteke from Aston Villa for more than £30 million ($37m).
The result, naturally, was chaos. Liverpool looked as disjointed as they had the previous season. Benteke led the line while Firmino played right and left. O'Driscoll, who was lucky to be at the club, openly questioned the wisdom of the Brazilian's signing on the training ground - something which hasn't been forgotten at Melwood.
They scraped a couple of wins but soon fell apart. They were stuffed 3-0 at home by West Ham and lost 3-1 away to Manchester United. Benteke struggled, Firmino struggled, everyone struggled. Between mid-August and early-October, Liverpool won just one of nine games.
We know now that plans to replace Rodgers with Jurgen Klopp were already well advanced by the time the call came from Gordon after that draw at Everton. Klopp would arrive a few days after Rodgers' sacking declaring that "nobody likes this team....not even the team."
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“I understood,” said Rodgers. “From their perspective, maybe I could have gone in the summer but they wanted to give me the chance.
“It was a tough start to that season and they felt it needed a change. Look, it worked out brilliantly for them.”
This weekend, Rodgers returns to Anfield for the first time since his departure. He brings a Leicester side which sits third in the Premier League and will be looking to become the first team to take points off Liverpool this season.
Now 46, and older and wiser, Rodgers says he holds no ill-feeling towards his former club.
“I was never going to be bitter,” he said this week. “I wanted [Klopp] to succeed and the club to succeed.
“I was proud to work for Liverpool and I will always be thankful to them for giving me the opportunity. I am just so looking forward to going back.”
When he does, he can expect a warm reception from the home supporters. It may have ended painfully, but Liverpool fans don’t forget.
With a little more luck, Brendan Rodgers would have been an Anfield legend.