Rafa Watch

[S-RED]

CLASSLESS CUNT

Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson says former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez has replaced Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea at a fortunate time.

Benitez won the World Club Cup with Inter soon after taking over from Jose Mourinho and could to do so again when Chelsea play in the event next month.

"Rafael Benitez is very lucky," Ferguson said.

"On his CV in two weeks he could have two world championships and nothing to do with the construction of the teams."

[Shaggy]

Yep but some of the papers (at least Sam Wallace's piece in the Indy) has attributed his reply in the presser as a response about the fake quote, when he was referring either to the one you mention or the real 'plastic flags' quote.

[Shaggy]

CLASSLESS CUNT

Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson says former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez has replaced Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea at a fortunate time.

Benitez won the World Club Cup with Inter soon after taking over from Jose Mourinho and could to do so again when Chelsea play in the event next month.

"Rafael Benitez is very lucky," Ferguson said.

"On his CV in two weeks he could have two world championships and nothing to do with the construction of the teams."

Poor cunt's obsessed. His face will be extra purple tonight.

[kev776]

https://www.facebook.com/montse.s.be...75993105786394

Lives in: Liverpool

From: Liverpool

[red g]

CLASSLESS CUNT

Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson says former Liverpool boss Rafael Benitez has replaced Roberto Di Matteo at Chelsea at a fortunate time.

Benitez won the World Club Cup with Inter soon after taking over from Jose Mourinho and could to do so again when Chelsea play in the event next month.

"Rafael Benitez is very lucky," Ferguson said.

"On his CV in two weeks he could have two world championships and nothing to do with the construction of the teams."

Did not take that cunt long to get rattled did it? I think someone is a little bit worried.

l

[magicalbarnes]

Poor cunt's obsessed. His face will be extra purple tonight.

The media will lap it up, fergie fails to realise (he does realise actually but hes just doing his upmost to play down rafas achievements) you must have something about you for the current euro champions to employ you on two separate occasions. He also won it with LFC. It hurts fergie that he's only won the world club championship himself once. At manU it took fergie two decades to get to two champ league finals. At lfc it took rafa two years.

This really is fergies worst nightmare, rafa with funds and world class players. Rafas a lot wiser this time around. He was new to the country & media last time, and fergie played upon that. His responses this time around will be a lot more witty and dismissive.

I would love rafa to win the league title this year & and suarez to be crowned player of the year. That would send the old fool senile!

[G]

I know your post is a joke. So this isn't aimed at you. But I have seen a lot of people suggesting he would do this. To me that's pretty disrespectful to Rafa. He has far more integrity than that. Plus, its silly to even think someone would do that in a professional capacity.

I can't believe anyone who has suggested it may have been serious

Still gutted he's gone there.In fact I'm just as gutted Valero is there too.We really could do with his skills

[red g]

From 'Rafa's Rant' to priests on sugar mountains, Mr Benitez is always good for a soundbite - TEAMtalk revisits the new Chelsea manager's best.

FROM RAFA WITH LOVE

"I am a very proud man today because all managers like to arrive at the best clubs and we know Liverpool is one of the most important clubs in the world."

"It feels as if I have been on a permanent honeymoon since I arrived here; I am on a cloud and I feel as if with Liverpool I have found the love of my life."

"Before, I said that they (Liverpool fans) were maybe the best supporters in England. Now maybe they are the best supporters in Europe."

"I can say Liverpool is a joy. My office here is 20 metres long and eight metres wide, it is bigger than the oval office in the White House. I can see the training grounds and it's incredible, like being in another world."

OLD FRIENDS

"I am not in football looking for friends, I want to win trophies. If the big rival of Liverpool Football Club is just thinking about me months after [leaving] that is quite positive. It means we were doing something well."

"I was going to the [2006 Champions League] final in Paris - Barcelona v Arsenal - we were (Benitez and Sir Alex Ferguson) together in the bar and it was quite interesting because we were friends. But when we were close to them we were not friends. It's football and I will say I don't want to be friends. If he wants to have a good relationship fine, but I want to win trophies."

"He's (Mourinho, at Inter) not here anymore, but if everything was so perfect then why did he leave? Why did he choose to join another team?"

"I am sure Chelsea do not like playing Liverpool. When they are talking and talking and talking before the game it means they are worried. Maybe they're afraid?"

TALKING TACTICS

"I need to know why after all the problems in the game there was only three minutes."

"I remember Sir Alex sent me a letter of congratulations when we won the Champions League, praising the tactical changes we made at half time."

"I try to relax when I am watching a game but it is something you cannot change, you are analysing the game. You are watching what will happen and why it is happening. I'll be watching with my wife and I'll say 'goal' then two seconds later it's a goal. Because you can see the positions of the defenders, the winger may be free or the full-back goes late or something like that. So without thinking too much, you are just analysing."

"I don't sleep too much, for example. I wake up early in the morning and watch games. Normally now you have games on Monday, on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and Sunday. So you have every day during the week and at the weekend you can see the Spanish league normally has two games, and the Bundesliga one or two, and Serie A another two. So with the Premier League you can see maybe six or seven games on Saturday and on Sunday more or less the same."

FACTS!

"I want to talk about facts. I want to be clear, I do not want to play mind games too early, although they seem to want to start. During the Respect campaign - and this is a fact - Mr Ferguson was charged by the FA for improper conduct after comments made about Martin Atkinson and Keith Hackett. He was not punished. He is the only manager in the league that cannot be punished for these things. How can you talk about the Respect campaign and yet criticise the referee every single week? We know what happens every time we go to Old Trafford and the United staff. They are always going man-to-man with the referees, especially at half-time when they walk close to the referees and they are talking and talking. All managers need to know is that only Mr Ferguson can talk about the fixtures, can talk about referees - and nothing happens.

"We need to know that I am talking about facts, not my impression. There are things that everyone can see every single week. To complain and to always have an advantage is not fair. Two years ago we had a lot of early kick-offs away on Saturdays when United were playing on Sundays. And we didn't say anything. Now he is complaining about everything, that everybody is against United. But the second half of the season will see them playing at home against all the teams at the top of the table, it is a fantastic advantage.

"At Christmas, United played on the 29th and the rest of the teams played on the 28th. We were away against Newcastle two days after playing Bolton. They were playing about 40 hours later, but they were not complaining then. If he wants to talk about fixtures, and have a level playing field, there are two options if we don't want more problems with fixtures. Sky and Setanta have the right to choose their games and it will be the same for everyone. So Mr Ferguson will not be complaining about fixtures and a campaign against United. Or there is another option. That Mr Ferguson organises the fixtures in his office and sends it to us and everyone will know and cannot complain. That is simple."

GHOST GOAL

"Luis (Garcia) said to me that as he turned away, he was right on the line, and he said the ball was over the line. And after the game my secretary Sheila, who was sitting right in line in the main stand, said to me that the ball had crossed the line. She is a very honest person and that was good enough for me. It was a goal."

STAND-UP GUY

"Winning trophies has made me put on weight."

"I talk to Carra, if you can understand him you can understand anyone."

"Fabio (Aurelio) will be out for three weeks, so Riise knows he has to be ready and give everything for us. The best solution would be for him to score at Stamford Bridge... in the right goal."

"The other day, he (Steven Gerrard) wanted to play but he was only able to look to the right, so I told him he could play as a left winger! We'll see if he can turn his head round and look the other way now. We will talk together, with the doctor. The player will say he wants to play, but there's an easy way of finding out whether he's fit. I will come up and tap him on the left shoulder and if he turns to face me without any pain, we will know he can play."

"How can you tell your wife you are just popping out to play a match and then not come back for five days? [on Test cricket]"SEAGULLS, SARDINES AND TRAWLERS

"I feel that Mr Hodgson he doesn't understand. Every single press conference is worse than the last one. He's talking about things he doesn't know. Some people cannot see a priest on a mountain of sugar. He doesn't understand, maybe he has been in the job for not so long."

"I was watching the fans and I was really sad after the defeat the other day. We have a saying in Spanish, which is: 'White liquid in a bottle has to be milk. What does this mean? It means that after 86 points and finishing second in the league, what changed? The Americans, they chose a new managing director and everything changed. So, white liquid in a bottle: milk. You will know who is to blame. White liquid in a bottle. If I see John the milkman in the Wirral, where I was living, with this bottle, I'd say, 'It's milk, sure.'"

WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT TORRES

"I'm confident it (Liverpool sell Torres) will never happen. If it did, I'd resign."

"I think last year we were talking about £70m. People were talking about maybe you receive an offer from another club. They were talking about £70m. He was not playing at the same level the last time, but he is still a very good player. It is big money but could [have been] even better."

"When you talk about the Premier League, you talk about a lot of players with quality so it is not easy to pick just one, but he is among the best."

"Torres knows the Premier League and he was doing really well with that. It's a question of confidence and he will do well again. He will come back."

FINAL THOUGHTS

"If Chelsea are naive and pure, then I'm Little Red Riding Hood."

"I don't think I have the words to express how I feel at this moment."

[Shaggy]

http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/premier-league/benitez-finds-the-devil-in-every-detail-8344624.html

Benitez finds the devil in every detail

Chelsea's new manager is more meticulous than any other to have worked under Roman Abramovich

IAN HERBERT

There was a clue to the inner workings of Rafael Benitez in his answer to the question of which football coaching book he might recommend, in the Ask Rafa feature which concluded his chronicles on the European Championships in The Independent this summer. Benitez suggested the works of the Hungarian tactician Arpad Csandi, some of which were out of print, and Dante Panzeri, who wrote Futbol Dinamica de lo Impesando – not so much a tactics book but an entire approach to the game.

That is Benitez for you: the man with such an insatiable appetite for the analysis of the game that he has been compiling detailed information for 30 years on where penalty-takers place their kicks and – as he explained in one of those summer columns – likes to divide the goal into six numbered sections when telling his goalkeepers precisely where a ball is likely to be struck. At Liverpool, his goalkeeping coach Jose Manuel Ochoterena would yell the numbers at Jerzy Dudek or Pepe Reina when the moment came. The keepers were drilled by sitting in front of a latop before a match, though even Benitez admits that "sometimes it is understandable that they forgot". The white heat of the 2005 Champions League final was one such occasion, though that night turned out fine.

Benitez's friend Paco Lloret has described him as someone whose belief in the rational is almost Cartesian. As a child he would spend hours immersed in sessions of the complex tactical board game "Stratego", against his brother, and the story told in his new book Champions League Dreams of how he prepared Liverpool to get the better of Jose Mourinho's Chelsea through set-pieces in the tournament's 2007 semi-final shows how that served him well. Calculating that Mourinho would be scouting Liverpool for three or four games beforehand, Benitez "hid" his special pre-planned set-piece for weeks, saving it for Daniel Agger who scored from it when the sides met.

Some Liverpool supporters will say that Benitez – the man who had the salt and pepper pots straight out at a hotel to demonstrate various tactical points when we met in Liverpool last year – thought too much. Many remember him substituting Fernando Torres and Steven Gerrard in the away game at Reading in December 2007, conceding hopes of winning in order that Liverpool were ready for a vital Champions League trip to Marseilles three days later. Some players will say that they have not liked what Lloret describes as Benitez's "insatiable diligence" – this deeply serious man's inability to enjoy success. His constant desire to put mistakes right, think of the next game and keep himself and those around him in a constant state of pressure.

One of the excellent anecdotes in Fernando Torres's biography El Niño concerns a day when, after Torres had scored 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.'"

Benitez explains in his new book that the anecdote "shows we were trying to help him". Jamie Carragher says he has "never spoken to Rafa about anything other than football" though the defender adds in his biography that Benitez has had "the greatest overall influence" on him as a defender. Coming from Carragher, that is something.

The Benitez style is confrontational. He can seem tactless. He always knows best. He has particular disdain for players who believe they have the right to play because of their reputation and experience – which could store up trouble at Stamford Bridge. Life was never the same for Robbie Keane at Liverpool after he challenged Benitez's authority in a game at Tottenham and Carragher tells how Peter Crouch's relationship with the manager changed once he'd become a star player for England.

Perhaps a little more diplomacy in his relationship with players would help – though perhaps adding it would take away a little of that calmness and composure which Benitez derives from the fact that he always believes he has everything covered and that the players need only adhere to his plan. His fearlessness explains why he once sent out right-footed Alvaro Arbeloa at left back to mark Lionel Messi. The plan worked because Arbeloa was so endlessly drilled. "He is always pushing the players because it is the best way to improve," Torres has said. One of Benitez's players from his time at Valencia has observed that "obsession is good for work, but bad for life". Carragher is not a Benitez fan but he agrees a professional distance can be a good thing.

Benitez is not without emotional intelligence. His preparations for the Istanbul final of 2005, for example, included an initial tactical video for players and then a 10-minute film, with music from the Beatles, capturing the greatest moments in the history of the club, from key goals to winning finals. The supporters adored him at Anfield, a stadium where that analytical mind told him You'll Never Walk Alone should no longer be played when the players were in the tunnel – but when the they were actually on the pitch, to generate maximum momentum. "Small details," as Benitez would say.

A minute's silence observed at Anfield was like none anywhere else for this man. "You can hear the rain fall," he once told Lloret, when the writer was setting about writing his invaluable appreciation of the manager, entitled simply Rafa Benitez. Adaptation to the less homely environment than Merseyside will be tough. He is also a huge believer in the team ethic. It is why he so often uses the plural "we", instead of "I" when talking about what he and his coaching staff have planned.

What can be said for sure about Chelsea's ninth manager in nine years is that he will be more meticulous and unstinting in his efforts than any who went before. He is someone who manages with a mixture of excessive passion and analytical curiosity, Lloret reflects. "Someone unstintingly dedicated to his profession. A lover of football who has made his vocation the driving force of his whole life."

[Konstro]

Ferguson is old school, when he was starting it took 4 years to win anything.

And also it probably explains his close affinity to Moyes. Gollum is building for 10 years, nobody could say he was lucky if it ever happens.

[Shaggy]

[kingfunk]

[McDermotX]

Cockface and Legend

Really, really doesn't look right

[Norbs]

Cockface and Legend

Really, really doesn't look right

Bloke in the foreground looks like he's got really really skinny legs

[Fivex]

Oscar is that?