Rodgers: "We're Playing for Professional Pride"

The relationships between a club's manager, its fans, and the press can easily fall into a negative feedback loop over the course of a season. The press needs something to print, the gaffer answers the same inane questions week after week, and managerial platitudes start to sound like white noise to fans, all before cycling back to a new round of press queries ahead of the next match.

With eight matches left, Brendan Rodgers is still handling questions about the club's ambitions for the remainder of the season. Perhaps taking a cue from Jamie Carragher's beautifully blunt statement that he's "sick" of talking about reaching a specific target place in the league table, Rodgers turned discussion to the importance of making the supporters and the city proud.

"This is a club where there is institutional pride," Rodgers said. "Of course, we always want to be challenging for trophies but if that's not the case, you need to represent the shirt and the city. Every game is vital. We're playing for professional pride. We're at a stage in the season where we don't have a trophy to play for but we still have to fight.

"This is a club where you never, ever have an easy game. And every time you play, you are representing great supporters. So for us there's everything to play for. We'll keep going right to the very end."

That pride runs deep with this club is not news, nor is it a revolutionary strategy to butter up fans a bit by talking about how important they are. But at the very least, playing for "professional pride" seems to be code for "let's not embarrass ourselves out there" and, after the 3-1 loss to Southampton, that's a sentiment that most should be able to rally behind.