‘Benitez’s Istanbul miracle has inspired me as a coach’
Mauricio Pellegrino tells Sam Wallace how ex-liverpool manager influences his approach at Southampton
When he recalls Liverpool’s famous comeback in Istanbul in 2005, Mauricio Pellegrino says he will never forget how his mentor Rafael Benítez tore up two weeks of Champions League final preparation in a few minutes – a triumph, the new Southampton manager says, of managerial “imagination”.
Pellegrino, giving his first major interview since being appointed, was a Liverpool player back then, cup-tied for the Champions League and watching from the stands as his team fell three goals behind AC Milan. At half-time, he decided that the only appropriate course of action as respite from the catastrophe unfolding on the pitch was to have a beer, and he was in the bar when Steven Gerrard scored Liverpool’s first, prompting him to rush back to his seat.
“We were 15 days preparing the final, preparing how we press, how we attack, set-pieces, and in 30 minutes they killed us,” Pellegrino says. “And Rafa changed everything. For this reason, there is something more important than organisation and planning – it is imagination.
“We played with three defenders! We never played with three defenders before, but we had to control [Hernan] Crespo and [Andrei] Shevchenko better and maybe it allowed us to be stronger in the middle. We played 3-4-3 and we scored three goals, and then we changed again and Steven Gerrard played at full-back.”
Pellegrino could go on, but this is a man who has had such a full career that we are obliged to move on to other great days and games.
As a player, he had an uncanny knack of being present at some big moments in the game, from Velez Sarsfield’s 1994 Intercontinental Cup triumph, to Barcelona’s league win of 1998-99, to Valencia’s two Champions League final defeats and two La Liga titles.
Given the managers he has played for and the team-mates he has played alongside, it is little wonder that the Argentine regards the Virgil van Dijk situation as a minor bump in the road – and that experience is why Saints appointed him. An hour in Pellegrino’s company is enough to tell you he is an idealist, a manager who often references his childhood as a farmer’s son in the countryside in Leones, a small town in Cordoba province, and who, at 45, has a fresh perspective on the game.
At 16, he moved to Buenos Aires and lived with Velez apprentices at the stadium, where they developed a brilliant home-grown side who won the Copa Libertadores and then the Intercontinental world title. The AC Milan side they beat in Japan in 1994 was the Fabio Capello team who had thrashed Barcelona 4-0 in the Champions League final, and Pellegrino says that, in South America, that one-off clash of continental champions was seen as the biggest prize.
His manager was Carlos Bianchi, an innovative Argentine who also coached in Europe and whose methods had a profound effect on Pellegrino. But there were others, including Marcelo Bielsa and Eduardo Lujan Manera, who, as a player, served a prison sentence for assaulting an AC Milan rival in the 1969 Intercontinental Cup final. In Europe, Pellegrino played for Louis van Gaal, Hector Cuper, Benítez and Claudio Ranieri before his own managerial career took him from Valencia, back to Argentina then to relative success last season with Alavés in Spain.
“My managers changed my life, and my habits as a human,” he says. “Oooof, I had a lot. I remember all of them, including managers when I was a teenager: the meetings, the advice. There is a time as a teenager when your manager is more important than your father. When you are a teenager, you think ‘I’m cleverer than you’ – but you aren’t. This is a problematic age. You are discovering a lot of things and the managers were very important. I admired them, I always wanted to be like them.”
From that Barcelona team he played in during the 1998-1999 season, the number of managerial graduates is astonishing, and not just the most famous names, Pep Guardiola, Frank de Boer and Luis Enrique. “Oh, the majority of the team are managers,” Pellegrino says. “Sergi [Barjuan] is a manager; Albert Ferrer is a manager; Abelardo [Fernández] is a manager; [Patrick] Kluivert was a coach and technical director; Phillip Cocu too.” And that is before one factors in the career of the then Barcelona assistant manager, Jose Mourinho.
In his season managing Alavés, Pellegrino often asked the players to think about the essential reasons they came to love the game, a question he is happy to discuss when we meet at Southampton’s Staplewood training ground. Now, in the richest league in the world, I venture that the problem of bringing together 25 millionaires under a common cause is the most
‘As a teenager my managers changed my life, my habits as a human. I wanted to be like them’
difficult facing any manager. “In my childhood, and that of all my team-mates, we played for fun,” he says. “To be happy on the pitch, to be together, giving everything to beat the rival, not to win money. Today, people think that success is money: nice cars, nice women. For me the money is OK, but today the values are changing a little.
“This is my point of view I want to express: at a social level, people don’t know their neighbours. We are always thinking of ourselves, ourselves, ourselves. The people who are with me don’t matter. When we think about what we need as a team, we have to respect each other. I am responsible for changing this dynamic which we get from society. But in just one hour a day? It’s really difficult. Today, every player has a nice business around them: their agents, mother, father, brother, fans, uncle, sponsor, adidas – all of them because this is the most beautiful guy in his village. Everybody says, ‘Oh, you are handsome, you are the best,’ because this guy gets a nice salary.
“We have 25 of these guys and we have to change all these messages that they receive every single day. The first thing the player has to do is to enjoy his profession, and I enjoy my profession when I give my best, not when I gain money.
“The money is OK. The money is good because in 10 years no one remembers you. Players are like cars. When they are new they are really nice but after 10 or 20 years, no one remembers the car and the life of the player is the same. You can never come back once you finish. In just one day, your life changes for ever. You are still really young, but as a player you are old.”
At Alavés, where Pellegrino finished ninth and reached the Copa Del Rey final, his approach to team-building seemed to work. Certainly Van Dijk has been left in no doubt as to where he stands, banished to working on his own until he is ready to play. After losing to Augsburg, Southampton play the second of their two home friendlies today against Sevilla.
They open their season at home to Swansea City and not until Boxing Day will Pellegrino face compatriot Mauricio Pochettino, formerly of Southampton and the brightest young managerial spark in the Premier League.
They were Argentina Under-20 team-mates at the World Cup of 1991 in Portugal. Was that another of Pellegrino’s successful teams? “Nah, we lost, we were a disaster as a team,” he says. “I remember we played against Portugal, who had an incredible squad with Luis Figo, Rui Costa. They beat us 3-0.
“I met Mauricio there. We studied together to get the [Uefa] A-licence in Madrid. I was working in Valencia’s academy and Mauricio was at Espanyol. He is from Murphy, a small city, and I am from Leones. It is not too far.”
Yet it will be the visit of Newcastle United in October that Pellegrino will have the strongest feeling about, when he faces the man who taught him much of what he knows of management.
“Rafa was one of the people who changed a little bit the way that the managers teach the player. When I was a player we were always told, ‘You have to do this, you have to do that.’ But Rafa was different. He asked the players how they felt and changed the mentality. At a pedagogic level, Rafa was the best coach in my life. It was really nice to work with him as a player and then his assistant for three years at Liverpool and Inter Milan. For me, it was like a Masters.”