RAFA POP AT KLOPP
Liverpool are great to watch but they MUST win trophies
RAFA Benitez has warned Jurgen Klopp that his Liverpool side must win a major trophy if they are to be remembered as a great team.
Liverpool’s front three of Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and Sadio Mane have lit up the Premier League, but Benitez says that will count for nothing if the club fail to become english or european champions.
the newcastle boss, who returns to Anfield tonight, reflected on his Liverpool team of 2008-09 who were Premier League runners-up but did not lift any silverware.
‘the best we had was the team who finished second in the league with 86 points.’ said Benitez. ‘We beat Real Madrid in the Bernabeu 1-0, Man United 4-1, Real Madrid 4-0, then Aston Villa 5-0. they were days when we were playing attacking, aggressive football, similar to this Liverpool side. But they don’t talk about that week when we won 5-0 against Aston Villa.
‘they don’t remember the games. they remember trophies. the way you do things is important, yes, but after you have to win ( trophies). this Liverpool side have the potential to do it. i like to watch them.
‘they play with quality and pace and that is what makes the difference in football.’
The miracle of Istanbul will always define Rafael Benitez and fragments of the memory are still coming to mind even now, nearly 13 years on.
There was one just the other week about how he was making notes for his half-time team talk at the moment Liverpool went 3-0 down to hernan Crespo’s goal against AC Milan in that 2005 Champions League final.
At a talk in Newcastle, Benitez admitted for the first time that he’d been briefly overwhelmed in that moment.
‘What could I say in english? It’s quite difficult. It has to be very clear in that short team talk,’ he said.
It’s hard to avoid the sense that for Benitez, everything in professional life will, deep down, be a pale imitation of those six years he spent at Anfield, where he returns this evening with his Newcastle United team.
Long after leaving the club he would pack out the Liverpool empire with occasional talks.
he brought the house down at the same theatre with a walk-on role in a performance of the hit play One Night in Istanbul. West Kirby, on the Wirral, is still the Benitez family home, to which he generally repairs only fortnightly during the season.
he’s been back to Anfield twice as a manager in the eight years since he left — 2-2 draws with Chelsea in April 2013 and with Newcastle United, during the six-match unbeaten run which could not avoid relegation in 2016. But this time you sense he has finally relocated the sense of belonging he had back then.
Newcastle resembles Liverpool in two ways, he told that recent Newcastle audience. ‘I can hear my name in the street and my name is the only word I can understand in the street!’ The task on the Tyne dwarfs what he inherited on the Mersey in 2004. Liverpool’s American owners, Tom hicks and George Gillett, were cowboys, who sold Xabi Alonso to meet an interest payment demand.
But at least when Dani Alves was denied to Benitez, the Americans agreed to buy Dirk Kuyt.
At Newcastle, Daniel Sturridge, Tammy Abraham and Willy Caballero are just three of the signings Mike Ashley has refused to sanction. In many ways it’s a Championship team he’s still equipped with.
‘It’s the most difficult job he’s ever had,’ says someone who has worked closely with Benitez.
‘At other clubs, the house was decorated and you put in the furniture. At Newcastle, you had to build the house.’
The overhaul of the Darsley Park training ground in North Tyneside was so substantial that skips outside the place were filled with old doors, desks and radiators. It did not even have a 4G training surface. For all the French signings Newcastle have made made, there was no player liaison officer who spoke the language.
That kind of inheritance is not supposed to happen to a Champions League-winning manager, though the chaos somehow epitomised the crazy places Benitez has occupied in the eight years since he left Liverpool.
At Chelsea, where he arrived as interim manager after Roberto Di Matteo was sacked in 2012, the antipathy he faced produced the extraordinary spectacle, during an FA Cup quarter- final at Old Trafford, of Benitez being verbally abused by home and away fans at the same time.
Chelsea’s fans were ‘silenced’ when his substitutions were key to them fighting back from 2-0 down to draw.
Getting on with owner Roman Abramovich was the least of his problems. When the Russian invited him round to dinner after Chelsea’s 2-1 win over Arsenal in January 2013, the Spaniard ended up playing indoor football with the Russian’s children.
In the last two months of that 2012-13 season, Benitez’s Chelsea beat United twice, won the europa League and took 26 points from 30 in the Premier League.
Yet, he vanished without fanfare, unable to express a public desire to stay because it would have antagonised the fans.
At Napoli he did find love, though there was also the presence of the Neapolitan Camorra mafia to contend with. And the lousy mobile phone reception in parts of the golf complex opposite the Castel Volturno training ground, where he was housed. he found himself trekking back to his office in the evening, to use the landline.
his current apartment, at Jesmond in Newcastle’s suburbs, just doesn’t compare.
he left for the Real Madrid opportunity that he could not refuse, though there was a look in his eyes
He ended up playing indoor football with Abramovich’s children
at his unveiling as manager, in June 2015, that told you he knew he was taking political poison. He could not even answer English press conference questions in English at the Bernabeu that day, knowing that would upset the home contingent. He was gone inside six months.
His accomplishments at Liverpool have looked increasingly impressive as barren years have rolled by for that club. Yet he has remained on the outside of the establishment and only in the past year or so has the sneering by some finally receded.
The negativity may have something to do with the way he does not conform.
While Jose Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp are busy expounding philosophies and being characterised as modernisers because of it, Benitez — with his staunch belief in the rational — is assessing only which system he will prepare to face next. ‘I leave philosophy to Socrates and Plato,’ he once said.
This is the man who, when asked at one Q and A to recommend a football coaching book, suggested the works of the Hungarian tactician Arpad Csanadi. The man who imported to our shores the 4-2-3-1 system, having watched the tactical innovator Juan Manuel Lillo develop it at Salamanca.
As a child he would spend hours immersed in sessions of the complex tactical board game ‘Stratego’, against his brother. He’s approaching 25 years as a manager and has compiled across the years detailed information on where penalty-takers place their kicks.
He likes to divide the goal into six numbered sections when telling his goalkeepers precisely where a ball is likely to be struck. He will ‘hide’ set-piece ideas for weeks ahead of big games, knowing that opposition managers will be watching. The overwhelming view from Newcastle players — Jamaal Lascelles, Matt Ritchie and Mikel Moreno have all said it publicly — is Benitez makes players better.
‘I have come on leaps and bounds since he has been here,’ Lascelles told Sportsmail earlier this year. Some will say that they have struggled to adjust to what Benitez’s friend Paco Lloret describes as the ‘insatiable diligence’ of this deeply serious man.
Jamie Carragher once said that he had ‘never spoken to Rafa about anything other than football’. But the defender adds in his autobiography that Benitez had ‘ the greatest overall influence’ on him as a defender. Coming from Carragher, that is something.
Fernando Torres relates in his own autobiography, El Niño, the story of how, after scoring twice in Liverpool’s 2-0 win over Chelsea in February 2009, he was tying up his boots ready to head out to the training pitch. The weekend papers had been full of stories about Torres being set to become a father and he takes up the story.
‘ Congratulations, Fernando,’ Rafa says. ‘Thanks, boss,’ I reply. I assumed he was congratulating me on the pregnancy and I paused, expecting the obvious next question. I was wrong.
‘Just as we’d anticipated — attacking the near post really paid off yesterday,’ he said. ‘You got ahead of the defender into that space we talked about, which gave you an advantage and allowed you to (score) with a header.’
Torres loved Benitez, all the same. The manager brought out qualities in him which a succession of other managers were nowhere near locating.
Others share the sentiment. Nine of the 11 main starters in the Napoli side currently top of Serie A were Benitez signings. Juan Mata and David Luiz’s best spells for Chelsea were during Benitez’s brief time at the helm. Gareth Bale was deeply disappointed to see him leave Madrid. The side’s recent labours under Zinedine Zidane put Benitez’s Bernabeu period into a different perspective.
He has certainly put belief back into the Newcastle side which will pull up at Anfield. Benitez talked about medium term top- six aspirations, at that recent talk.
The giant image of a match-day St James’ Park which hangs behind his desk reflects his appreciation of Newcastle as a place of monumental football theatre.
He will tell you it’s just like those Liverpool days, though only he knows whether that is economy with the truth. Benitez always felt that a minute’s silence observed at Anfield was like nothing else for him. ‘You can hear the rain fall,’ he once said.
And there was a hint of what today means when he stepped up to accept the North East’s Manager of the Year trophy in Durham, earlier this week. ‘Now, we are only thinking about Anfield. About the next challenge against Liverpool FC,’ he said. ‘It is a very special match for me.’