Taste of humble pie for Benítez
By Kaveh Solhekol
Bolton Wanderers 2 Liverpool 0
EVERYONE KNOWS THAT THE TITLE race is a marathon, not a sprint, but few Liverpool supporters were expecting their team to lose three league matches by the end of September and allow their rivals to set the pace in a race that looks increasingly likely to be won again by Chelsea, Arsenal or Manchester United.
The hegemony at the top of the Barclays Premiership appeared to be under serious threat when Liverpool lifted the European Cup at the end of Rafael Benítez’s first season in charge in May 2005, but like a singer who appears out of nowhere to top the charts with his debut release, the Liverpool manager looks to be struggling to repeat the trick.
The signings of Dirk Kuyt, Craig Bellamy and Jermaine Pennant during the summer were welcomed by the majority of fans in the red part of Merseyside as the icing on the cake, but on Saturday’s evidence, Benítez’s latest recipe has the texture and consistency of a Victoria sponge.
Uncertain in defence and lightweight in midfield and attack, Liverpool were made to pay a high price for some injudicious remarks that Benítez made on the eve of the match regarding Bolton Wanderers’s style of play. The Liverpool manager probably meant no harm by comparing Sam Allardyce’s team to the crude but effective Wimbledon side of the 1980s, but his remarks were interpreted as a slight by Bolton players, who rarely need encouragement to show their commitment to the cause.
Allardyce revealed that Benítez’s obser- vation that Bolton “play a lot of long balls” had spurred on his players to such an extent that “they were prepared to die rather than concede a goal”.
The Bolton defence, at the heart of which Abdoulaye Faye and Abdoulaye Meïté excelled, got to grips with Bellamy and Kuyt. As a result, Liverpool’s best chances were long-range efforts by Steven Gerrard and Xabi Alonso. Why Gerrard was made to spend most of the match on the flanks is anyone’s guess, but without arguably the best player in England standing in their way, Iván Campo and Gary Speed grew in stature and confidence as the match wore on.
Speed celebrated his 750th club appearance by drilling a low free kick past José Manuel Reina in the first half after the Spain goalkeeper was wrongly adjudged to have handled the ball outside the penalty area by Andy Halliday, the assistant referee, and Campo doubled the advantage six minutes after the interval with a firm header from a cross by Kevin Davies.
Benítez declined to point the finger of blame at himself or single out any of his players for criticism, but it will not have escaped his notice that Reina dived the wrong way for the first goal and that Campo had little trouble beating Steve Finnan in the air for the second.
“Every manager who comes here will tell you the same,” Benítez said. “It’s a physical game against a physical team — long balls, second balls, throw-ins, corners. This is the style of football. You are not telling lies. If the linesman had not put his flag up (to penalise Reina), maybe it would have been different.”
Depending on your view, Benítez showed courage or naivety in breaking the unwritten law of the banal that most managers adhere to when it comes to discussing the opposition before a match. His comments may have struck a chord with Liverpool supporters and neutral observers, but to the Bolton players they turned out to be a red rag to a bull.
“I was surprised by what he said,” Allardyce said. “They don’t like coming here and we don’t hide the fact that we will not disappoint them when they get here. We do what we do, which is to win football matches. If that upsets people, that’s just hard luck.”
94 AND COUNTING
Rafael Benítez altered his Liverpool starting line-up for the 94th successive match and again it was a big change, with four players left out from the team that beat Galatasaray in the Champions League in midweek.
Bolton Wanderers 2 Liverpool 0: Speed and Campo reign with fear factor
By Phil Shaw
Published: 02 October 2006
When Gary Speed first played against Liverpool, they were champions as well as the club he had hated as an Everton-mad paper boy in north Wales. On the day he marked his 750th appearance in club football with a goal and an inspirational performance for Bolton Wanderers, the title looked no more likely to return to Anfield than in the intervening 16 years.
As one of just three survivors from the first day of the Premier League (with Ryan Giggs and David James), Speed is steeped in its psychological battles. The midfielder, 37, knew that Liverpool, and their manager, Rafael Benitez, in particular, had lost this one to Bolton's Sam Allardyce - and with it a third successive away match without scoring.
By characterising Speed and company as a latter-day Wimbledon, with all its connotations of long-ball brutalism, Benitez handed his Bolton counterpart a gift. The Spaniard may also have planted uncertainty in his own team, who lacked the conviction to turn possession into chances and the resilience to recover from a controversial opener.
"It's a compliment for Liverpool to say they don't like the way we play," Speed said. "If you want to play fancy football against them, you'll get beaten nine times out of 10. We could do that, get beaten 4-3 and have everyone pat us on the back. But it wouldn't get us any points."
Allardyce had followed time-honoured practice by pinning Benitez's remarks on the dressing-room wall. The likes of Speed and his fellow scorer, Ivan Campo, he said, were "proud and talented players" who had been "wound up" by what they read. "It may have given them that extra 'woomph'," he added, "as if to say, 'Don't talk about us like that'."
The Bolton manager expressed surprise that someone as experienced as Benitez should have made such comments. There was little, he observed, to separate the sides in fouls committed or tackles made, yet he clearly enjoys exploiting the unease that the leading clubs feel about visiting the Reebok Stadium. "We call it the fear factor, and we try not to disappoint them when they get here."
Behind the bluster, Bolton are far from one-dimensional, if not top-six material. Though the whole is bigger than the sum of the parts, they have a fine goalkeeper, a burgeoning centre-back partnership and the craft of Speed and Campo. Nicolas Anelka alone did not play his role to perfection and would do well to study the tireless industry of Kevin Davies - as Thierry Henry reputedly does - if he is to justify Allardyce's outlay.
Benitez bemoaned a free-kick against Jose Reina, a referee's assistant having wrongly signalled that the goalkeeper had handled the ball outside the 18-yard box. However dubious the decision, Liverpool defended shabbily to let in Speed's ensuing shot, and again when Campo, who is no Nat Lofthouse, buried the third header Reina had conceded in four days.
They were Bolton's only efforts on target, as against 13 by Liverpool - the corner count was one to 11 - but Allardyce's assertion that "entertaining means winning" had its vindication in the rapture of the home supporters. Whereas he can justify that stance by reference to relatively slender resources, Anfield would not accept such logic.
On the thorny subject of Liverpool's away form, Benitez wanted "to analyse my team for two more months to see whether we need to improve". That may prove a luxury too far, even in a more open title race. In the mean time, the Spaniard could actually learn from Bolton. They do not serially rotate players because they do not have the numbers, but they do have continuity. In contrast, Steven Gerrard was in left midfield here and Peter Crouch on the bench days after the best goal of his career.
It summed up Liverpool's day that the best man in red, following a shirt swap, was an Evertonian. Speed's manager, eager to accentuate a positive after his recent problems, hailed his all-round game as equal to any in the Premiership. "At this rate," Allardyce said, "he could play until he's 40."
Goals: Speed (30) 1-0; Campo (51) 2-0.
Bolton Wanderers (4-1-4-1): Jaaskelainen; Hunt, Faye, Meite, Ben Haim; Campo; Diouf (Giannakopoulos, 87), Nolan, Speed, Davies; Anelka (Vaz Te, 84). Substitutes not used: Walker (gk), Tal, Fojut.
Liverpool (4-4-2): Reina; Finnan, Carragher, Hyypia, Riise; Pennant (Luis Garcia, 58), Alonso, Sissoko (Zenden, 75), Gerrard; Kuyt (Crouch, 49), Bellamy. Substitutes not used: Dudek (gk), Agger.
Referee: P Dowd (Staffordshire).
Booked: Bolton Wanderers Faye, Speed; Liverpool Crouch.
Man of the match: Speed.
Attendance: 25,061.
Shades of 1984 as Big Sam watches 'nullification plan' undermine Liverpool's title ambitions
Louise Taylor at the Reebok Stadium
Monday October 2, 2006
The Guardian
With his fondness for statistics, jargon, technology and, above all, being in absolute control, Sam Allardyce is the sort of character who might feature in an Aldous Huxley or George Orwell novel.
There were certainly shades of Brave New World and 1984 when the Bolton manager enthused about Saturday's "nullification plan" before discussing the "foul count" and the perils of individualism.
"To stop Liverpool playing, my players had to make personal sacrifices and we only created three chances, although two produced goals," he explained.
If Bolton's first goal, a Gary Speed free- kick, was down to a linesman wrongly judging José Reina to have handled outside his area before kicking downfield, the second reflected the failure of a worryingly shaky Liverpool defence to cut out Kevin Davies's cross. It resulted in the increasingly influential Iván Campo heading home, punishing Steve Finnan's aerial negligence, and sealed another away defeat which places a further dent in Rafael Benítez's title ambitions.
Seemingly in denial about Liverpool's current goal-scoring and goal-stopping shortcomings, Benítez insisted: "I would like to analyse my team after two more months to see whether we need to improve or not."
By then the championship may be out of reach, particularly if the Spaniard persists in succumbing to what is becoming a dizzying addiction to personnel rotation. Tellingly, when asked why he had dropped Peter Crouch - who replaced the disappointing Dirk Kuyt in the second half but proved no better at bringing the best out of Craig Bellamy - Benítez resorted to Allardyce speak: "Sometimes players need to know we need to manage."
Liverpool's manager hoped the referee would prove similarly interventionist but Phil Dowd failed to send Abdoulaye Faye off after the centre-half, already on a yellow card, elbowed Kuyt in the head.
Yet if Dowd ignored Benítez, Allardyce most certainly did not and newspaper articles containing the Spaniard's disparaging pre-match comments about Bolton's modus operandi were duly pinned to the home dressing-room wall.
"They wound my players up and might have given them that extra woomph," said Allardyce. "They are very proud and talented players.
"They've been exceptional at bigger clubs than this around the world. When they take on the basics here and then produce quality basics, we win."
The "basics" involve intimidation, much of it psychological. "We stay within the laws but we use the fear factor," admitted Allardyce, whose side's supreme organisation and concerted stifling of the opposition negated the need for dirtiness here. "Competing physically is a big part of our nullification game. But I've checked the foul count and it was about even."
Nevertheless the first half was initially dominated by Liverpool, whose lack of ruthlessness when it came to the final pass would later leave them vulnerable to their new-found defensive weaknesses.
Sure enough, when at 2-0 down they folded, midfield control had long since been ceded to the indefatigable Speed, making his 750th club appearance, and Campo.
It might have been different had Steven Gerrard been deployed centrally rather than wide on the left from the start. Although Liverpool's captain still impressed, he would have been far more effective directly up against the 37-year-old Speed who, for all his estimable all-round qualities, was permitted to look unusually good by Momo Sissoko.
Benitez's side have now taken a single point from a possible 12 on this season's travels. Maybe it is time for the great rotator to settle on a framework for the team, offer individuals full licence to be improvisational within it and start watching Gerrard and Bellamy undo the Boltons of this world.
Allardyce would doubtless disagree, but managers can sometimes be over-controlling; delegating a little more responsibility to a settled XI might do wonders for Benitez's already fading title hopes.
Man of the match Iván Campo (Bolton)
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