Brendan Rodgers has challenged his Liverpool players to produce a surge for lucrative top four positions in the Barclays' Premier League, after the Kop renaissance continued with a 2-0 victory at Aston Villa with goals from Fabio Borini and Rickie Lambert firing the Reds to another win on the road to recovering from their disastrous first-half of the season.
The Northern Irishman said after the game at Villa Park: "We've regained our identity and how the team has played for two years. In the opening four months of the season we were nowhere near where we had been and we had to find a solution. I changed the system (to a 3-4-3) and we are now playing very well.''
Rodgers continued: "If we can get through to through to the end of January and be somewhere near it, we showed last year we can put a run together to see us in there. That's still the objective. We believe if we keep working, we still have improvements to make. We are always trying to improve. That's the challenge here when you are working with young players - and there is still a lot of improvement left. We've been progressing well after hitting a real bump in the road in the early months of the season. Now we are performing at a good level and we know that if we can get ourselves close to the top four by the end of January, we are capable of putting a run together."
Regardless of the important victory on Saturday, it is clear Rodgers remains grounded in that his side still have work to do. He spoke of the Villa performance, adding: "It's a really young and exciting team, you saw today some of the football we played. We maybe could have had one or two more goals. It was a tough game and we have seen it through, so we'll just keep working well. The most important thing for me is the identity and style of the team - that's very much come back and the system may change or may not."