Roy Hodgson has hit back at suggestions that he may not have the pedigree to manage a club like Liverpool.
The Reds have had a stuttering start to the season, winning only one of their six Premier League games thus far, as they were also subject to a shock defeat in the League Cup at the hands of League Two side Northampton Town.
And to make matters worse, Everton's 2-0 victory over Birmingham City meant that David Moyes' men leapfrogged their Merseyside rivals, condemning them to a spot in the relegation zone.
Ahead of the game against Blackpool, the Reds boss was quizzed as to whether his approach might be wrong when it comes to managing Liverpool as opposed to his former club Fulham.
He said: "What do you mean by that? In 35 years how many clubs have I had.
"What do you mean do my methods translate? They have translated from Halmsteds to Malmo to Orebo to Neuchatel Xamax to the Swiss national team.
"So I find the question insulting. To suggest that, because I have moved from one club to another, that the methods which have stood me in good stead for 35 years and made me one of the most respected coaches in Europe don’t suddenly work, is very hard to believe.
"Experience is an important quality for any manager.
"We have a job to do and we know what to do. We're working at it and hopefully we’ll get some joy from our work during the course of the season."
In what turned out to be a thinly veiled attack at some of his players, the gaffer suggested that some who question his methods were not even as good as those he managed at Fulham.
Hodgson added: "At the moment, arguably one of the two players that people are suggesting are very different to the Fulham players I managed aren’t playing any better than those Fulham players.
"Journalists work on names rather than performances and what happens is that a judgement is based on names rather than what those players have actually done in a game.
"You have to take each game as it comes. You can’t live in a dream world of how wonderful it would be if every time one of your players got the ball he raced past four defenders and smashed it into the net.
"That would be living in a fantasy world. It is not going to happen against the type of teams we play. I couldn’t give a monkeys whether Liverpool are 16th or 18th. What bothers me is we’ve only got six points and I’d have liked a few more."
The 63-year-old also maintained that the expectations on his shoulders can only have a positive impact on him as a manager.
"The expectations here are very, very high so having had plenty of highs and some lows in my career can only be advantageous," he said.
"Are people suggesting that we should be doing the same as Arsenal, who have had the same team together for the last six years and Chelsea, who have just won the league?
"If so I would accuse them of being unrealistic at this moment in time.
"This is a new team, there are four or five new players. We finished seventh last season so I don’t understand why it’s suggested we should be comparing ourselves every day with Chelsea or Manchester United at this early stage of the season.
"It will be nice if we can get there. We will see but I certainly don’t make that demand upon the players."
He added: "If I had still been at Fulham and we had lost three or four of the opening games, then people would have been saying were the last two-and-a-half years a flash in the pan.
"Those things don’t bother me. It is one of those things you must learn to live with.
"It doesn’t change anything. I work the same way as I did last year."
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