Rafa Watch

[Daniel 7]

There was an interview he did on City FM in January where he was going on about how his kids were settled in the area and they didn't want to leave.

[Arn]

I think that the reason he is loves Liverpool is because Liverpool FC is a fantastic club and probably the most special club in the world. Anfield is probably the most special stadium in the world.

YNWA and all that. Once you played for us or been a part of it either as a supporter, player or staff then you simply can't stop loving it.

Player after player that played for us have said that we are Liverpool FC and love the place. They just love it. Almost no player want to leave. They want to stay and play for us.

[IN_RAFA_WE_TRUST]

THE Two players at chelsea.

[Shaggy]

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/benitez-i-will-always-love-this-city-but-i-want-another-job-2363840.html

Benitez: 'I will always love this city but I want another job'

Still fascinated by Liverpool, its football, its art and The Beatles, Rafa Benitez is also enjoying his new role as a writer about the game but longs for a return to a top-flight club in England. He talks to Ian Herbert

Saturday, 1 October 2011


Rafa Benitez is enjoying his new role as a football writer but longs to return to a top-flight team in England

Rarely has a former manager loomed so large over the place where his name was once sung.

The vast face of Rafael Benitez is currently smiling out beatifically from an advertising hoarding which will be unmissable today for all those who swing past on their way up towards the Scottie Road and to the Goodison Park derby which lies beyond. The poster promotes this month's An Audience with Rafa Benitez at the Liverpool Empire, the same theatre where the Spaniard's wonderfully impromptu appearance in a performance of the play One Night in Istanbul brought the house down last year. "We have to think about the future but we cannot forget about the past because it really was fantastic," Benitez says of his reasons for accepting another curtain call. "I'll answer all the questions I can."

Given the way that he has re-immersed himself on Merseyside since picking up the strands of a life here, following his departure from Internazionale in December, Benitez should be fairly well equipped. The provenance of Beatles lyrics, art galleries and Margaret Thatcher's economic effects on Merseyside are a few of the topics which have absorbed him since he returned to the house he and wife Montse had retained at Caldy, on the Wirral peninsula, as well as an understanding of the Blitz which claimed the lives of 4,000 residents. "Many of the children were evacuated," he explains, after lunch at the city's boutique Indigo Hotel, a short walk from the Pier Head.

Of course, there was always a different type of blitz on derby days like this, which were more excoriating for Benitez after he selected two little words to describe Everton, following the goalless Anfield encounter with them in February 2007. "Small club," Benitez said, sending the city into a fever. He is unrepentant about that, four years on, and still a little surprised that he walked out of a convivial post-match boot-room chat with David Moyes and into a storm. "If you remember, the game was 0-0 and we were attacking, attacking, attacking and they were defending, so after this game I wanted to say that they were a small club," he says. "I wanted to say they were a small team in the way that they were playing – deep, defensively and doing nothing in attack. That was my idea. When you play against a top side you know they will have more possession and they will be in more control and you have to find one or two counterattacks. I didn't want to be disrespectful to the club. When we had the meeting with the manager in the boot room and we were having a drink I explained to him. I was talking about the way they were playing, not the club."

Some will always say it was all a diversionary tactic to obscure Liverpool's failure to break Everton down that winter's day, though the cerebral mind of Benitez has always made him unflinching when it comes to plain speaking. The day he calmly took a handwritten list of complaints about Sir Alex Ferguson from his inside jacket pocket and read them out is another instance – history has mistakenly characterised it as a "rant" – and the decision to substitute Steven Gerrard 20 minutes from the end of October 2007's Goodison derby perhaps took the most sangfroid of all. Gerrard, who trudged from the field to gleeful blue derision that day, later said he was "hurt".

"I had Lucas [Leiva] on the bench and I could explain to him what I wanted," Benitez recalls, detailing the way Liverpool had entered the last 20 minutes at 1-1 against Moyes' 10 men. "I couldn't explain to the players on the pitch with the temperature at 180 [degrees.] I wanted less passion and more calm. Someone that could analyse the game and say 'we are not in a hurry. If you play 15 minutes with calm and you have possession you will have four or five chances'." When one fell to Lucas and an ensuing penalty took Liverpool to victory, the manager was vindicated.

The condiment pots have not been cleared from the table before us and as Benitez marshals them to demonstrate his point, it is clear that, after 10 months out of the game, the "small details" of past battles will not sustain him for terribly much longer. The salt and pepper pots soon become Micah Richards and Franck Ribéry in an exposition of why Bayern Munich beat Manchester City on Tuesday night. This is the Benitez realm, for now. At Caldy, the 51-year-old pores over videos of his past matches, observes games around the world and has staff to help keep him ahead of the curve on technical and sport science issues as he prepares himself for a club's call when it comes. A fascination with the idea of writing about the game – as he did in the year 2000, between managing Extremadura and Tenerife, when the website he contributed to coolly asked him for 200,000 hits a day – has been rekindled with a blog on his new rafabenitez.com site (his forensic analysis of why Ribéry destroyed City is not to be missed, incidentally).

"Rafael Benitez Maudes, Football Manager" states his business card and it is self-evident that he considers this period to be a temporary one. The same goes for his current presence on Merseyside. When we later emerge into the brilliant sunshine to meet a photographer, 10 car horns sound in the space of five minutes as he is spotted. Benitez grins and flashes thumbs. His continued interest in the Hillsborough Family Support Group – to whom he donated nearly £100,000 last year – has not gone unnoticed. He and his wife also hosted a lunch on Thursday to launch the charitable Montse Benitez Foundation, to help the couple's well-established financial efforts for the local Lily Centre breast cancer support group, Wirral Autistic Society and others.

But the fund-raising Audience with Rafa Benitez, on Sunday 16 October, can be for one night only. "We are organising something like this, having all the fans there, to give them something back; to give them all these thoughts that I have and at the same time raise money," he says. "But after this [event] I must say: 'Listen, I cannot do more for the city and the fans now. I must move forward now.' Whenever people say things about me, it always comes back to Liverpool – but I cannot just become 'the former manager'. I will not forget Liverpool and a part of [it] will always be in my heart but if another club comes I will try to do my best for that club, as I always have done. I am a professional football manager. I want to talk more about the future than the past."

The Premier League would appeal most – and though he will not publicly discuss the manner of his departure from Liverpool, it is hard to avoid the sense that he has something to demonstrate to a club he managed for six years and yet was more than content to see him go. It is a club which, under his tutelage, thrashed Real Madrid 4-0 at Anfield to stroll into the last eight of the Champions League just two and a half years ago. It already seems a lifetime ago.

From the outside, Benitez can discuss the quality players at Everton's disposal far more freely than he would have done as Liverpool manager in a week like this, and Phil Jagielka is the first name on his lips. "[Mikel] Arteta before he left[for Arsenal] and [Tim] Cahill were also very good players," he says. "The team's mentality was always very good, working hard altogether. If you don't have massive money you have to work hard for the team. When you have more money than anyone and you can buy the players that you want, OK you can buy the quality and maybe you no longer mind about the other things."

Yet the fascination for toppling Manchester United always absorbed Benitez more. "For the fans, for the city, we know what it means to beat Everton," he reflects. "When we were on the table we knew that United could be a six-points game. Everton was an important game for the feeling in the city. It is another thing when you are playing against the top teams. For me there are three teams now: United, Chelsea and City. You can see from the table that they are ahead of the others. Tottenham, Liverpool and Arsenal – they all have a very good team [too.] The others have better squads. One or two of the top six will make mistakes and it depends on the others if they will be there."

It is his fervent desire that he will soon be there, too, and no longer just a face in the audience.

Benitez on...

Everton

"If you remember, the game was 0-0 and we were attacking, attacking, attacking and they were defending, so after this game I wanted to say they were a small club. I wanted to say they were a small team in the way that they were playing"

Taking Gerrard off

"I had Lucas on the bench and I could explain to him what I wanted. I couldn't explain to the players on the pitch with the temperature at 180 degrees. I wanted less passion and more calm. Someone that could analyse the game"

His fundraising night

"We are organising something like this [An Audience with Rafa Benitez], having all the Liverpool fans there, to give them something back; to give them all these thoughts that I have and at the same time raise money"

Rivalry with United

"When we were at the top of the table, we knew that United could be a six-points game. Everton was an important game for the feeling in the city. It is another thing when you are playing against the top teams"

My Other Life

Discovering more about the place we live is a major part of life. There are only two or three places in Britain with Catholic and Protestant cathedrals and Liverpool is one. My wife Montse and I like to go to both of them. We love to be in the Wirral, which is a beautiful place. Montse has got me interested in historical aspects of the city and I'm still discovering more about The Beatles, whose songs I used to learn English as a boy. I didn't know the significance of the lyrics of Michelle, Help and Yellow Submarine at the time. I didn't even realise that the accent was different! I've got years of English TV to catch up on, remember. I like Only Fools and Horses and Father Ted. Jimmy McGovern is a writer I want to learn more about and I've been told about Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff with Sammy Lee in the cast!

[Shaggy]

http://www.rafabenitez.com/web/index.php?act=mostrarBlog&id_entrada=25&idioma=in

Champions League analysis 27-28/09/11

General Articles

by Rafa Benítez

We’ve had another Champions League round of games and as usual it gave us some interesting things to debate, analyse and consider.

I’m not going to analyse the groups too much, although some things stand out like Inter’s away win 2-3 against CSKA. With Ranieri’s arrival, a good coach with European experience, they have won two out of two.

Another thing that caught my eye was the hard fought win of Olympic Marseille against Dortmund, which impressed me on Tuesday. This makes Arsenal’s group, which appeared difficult at first, look better for the London side and the French team although it is still too early to be sure.

It also was a bit of a surprise to see how Real Madrid overcame Ajax at the Bernabeu – on the counter attack! The good news for football is that Kaka played well with a great goal and good assist.

Barcelona

Barcelona won 0-5 and showed their strength and the gulf between them and Borisov Belarus. But what is most noticeable about Barcelona is how they penetrate defences who have up to nine players in the box. Did you see Messi’s second goal? The Argentinian has scored 14 goals in 10 matches equalling the legendary Kubala with 194 goals, making him the second highest goalscorer for Barcelona.

Chelsea drew against Valencia, with a highly motivated Torres and clear chances to score. Great performance by the home keeper, Diego Alves, and as if it was ever any other way, football can be strange, one week talking about Lampard’s future and next he scores Chelsea’s goal. Then a ‘rare’ penalty by Soldado, the striker, to equalise for Valencia.

Arsenal–Olympiakos, 2-1

Arsenal won which is a big step forward. Not just in the performance but also for their self-belief. With so many injuries, Song playing at centre back and Andre Santos at left back, the defence played well despite this. Chamberlain showed his ability and pace on the right, with a positive attitude taking on defenders and also scoring the first goal. Arteta, assisted by Rosicky and both covered by Frimpong, kept the ball and dictated their play. The team tried to play their usual game and succeeded at times although they had some problems as well. Valverde, the Spanish coach, has brought in players like Orbaiz, Fuster and Ibagaza and others from the Spanish league, and at times they controlled and dominated the midfield. On the left flank, Mirallas penetrated well, but where they really caused problems for Arsenal was at corners. They had been defending zonally but changed to man to man, and a simple block in the 14th minute allowed Olympiakos to get a man free for a clear chance. Again in the 26th minute, they exploited poor positioning and Fuster scored with a free header and in the 28th minute Arsenal had more problems marking at the corner. It confirms what we have been saying for a long time, it is not the type of marking you use but the capacity and concentration of the defenders which makes you more successful when defending corners.

Bayern–City, 2-0

I’m sorry but I won’t talk about the Tevez incident because you can find that in the press. I’m more interested in the play.

Bayern played with their usual 4-2-3-1 and City had a ‘false’ 4-4-2, because Silva, nominally playing on the right was constantly in the middle. This allowed City to start well with superiority in the middle and with a lot of space on the right for Richards who was not being tracked by Ribery and he got in 3 times with a definite threat and even had a claim for a penalty. They also started pressing high which made it difficult for Bayern.

However, this attacking threat on the right for the City stars became a weakness for the first goal with Ribery’s dribble inside, assisted by Lahm overlapping on the left which gave them a 2v1 situation and Richards could do nothing about it. He was initially helped by Yaya Toure and then by his brother Kolo, but this left a gap in the middle which Mario Gomez exploited to net the rebound.

Another tactical aspect to consider was how Manchester City defended corners with the first line marking zonally and the second line man to man, leaving 3 forwards up.

I will finish with a puzzle and a question I ask myself surrounding the game which maybe someone can help me with – why, if there are 2 linesmen and 2 assistant referees, do they work on the same side of the pitch? We all know that the linesmen work different halves of the pitch and the referee covers it diagonally. Nowadays, with the 4th official there is yet another pair of eyes on the centre of the pitch even if he doesn’t make any decisions. With the 5th and 6th officials there is even more control of the areas on the pitch but why do they work the same side as the linesmen?

[Arn]

I will finish with a puzzle and a question I ask myself surrounding the game which maybe someone can help me with – why, if there are 2 linesmen and 2 assistant referees, do they work on the same side of the pitch? We all know that the linesmen work different halves of the pitch and the referee covers it diagonally. Nowadays, with the 4th official there is yet another pair of eyes on the centre of the pitch even if he doesn’t make any decisions. With the 5th and 6th officials there is even more control of the areas on the pitch but why do they work the same side as the linesmen?

I thought about that myself. Typical FIFA not to see how bloody stupid it is.

It is also typical Rafa to mention a mistake that almost no one thought about but that is very important.

[Lee]

I thought about that myself. Typical FIFA not to see how bloody stupid it is.

[Daniel 7]

That interview reads as the Echo session is his farewell to LFC.

I still want him to come back.

[BringbackBiscan]

That interview reads as the Echo session is his farewell to LFC.

I still want him to come back.

Very disrespectful to the man doing a great job. A far better manager then Rafa too fwiw.

[Chris]

Very disrespectful to the man doing a great job. A far better manager then Rafa too fwiw.

*awaits the mob*

[IN_RAFA_WE_TRUST]

Both Kenny And Rafa are LEGENDS. Love them both equally.

[Catrin]

Heart says Kenny, head says Rafa. Kenny was my boyhood hero but I don't have the same belief in him as I did in Rafa. I can't make myself believe that Kenny is going to take us to where we want to be any more than I can make myself believe that there is a god, or believe that in the long run life is fair and all good and bad luck evens itself out.

[Craig_H]

That's a bit weird though, because Kenny's currently having a better stab at it then Rafa managed in his last season (albeit with valid reasons)....but then, Kenny has also achieved what Rafa never managed to do.

The idea of Kenny being inferior to Rafa doesnt really have anything of substance to back it up IMO.

[Red_Polo]

There's the European cup to consider as well in fairness, but when it comes to this debate the bottom line for me is I don't understand the obsession some have of seeing two legends in such an oppositional light.

[Daniel 7]

Very disrespectful to the man doing a great job. A far better manager then Rafa too fwiw.

I'm sure Kenny wouldn't be arsed after he's retired.