As Rafa Benitez shares further stories about his time at Anfield, is it worth revisiting a strange relationship with such a great man?
IN many ways, Rafael Benitez’s mid-to-late Liverpool era remains none of my business.
I was still following Liverpool home and away during his early tenure. I was excited by what could be done in his name. I loved the 2005-6 team – all iron and bollocks after a year of soft underbellies and Istanbul being the all-consuming narrative of a very flawed outfit.
Then, I pretty much stopped being invested in football to the same degree. I stopped going to games, became more interested in still being asleep mid-afternoon on the weekend from the night before.
I found Liverpool’s overall situation frustrating. I felt like we’d all been duped by football ownership. I took a step back and decided that 2007-2010 was not really any of my business, other than a distant watching brief.
Guilt still surrounds some of that. But it’s perverse that I should feel a sense of responsibility to an incredibly gluttonous and capitalist enterprise which doesn’t need my money or support, if we’re all being honest.
Three years off – a period of extended gardening leave – isn’t so bad in a lifetime consumed by a football club and all its cultish embellishments.
To this day, I remain adamant that one of the contributing factors was Benitez himself. He was a Rubik’s Cube. I loved him, but I find him so incredibly frustrating and hard to understand at the same time.
As his performance on The Overlap Podcast proved this week, he can simultaneously be both incredibly calm and warm while emitting a part of his personality which borders on erratic and cold.
To listen to the podcast, in which Jamie Carragher rightly seems to get a bit frustrated with him at times, you hear recycled lines from Benitez’s time at Liverpool.
You had no money, yes and fair. You wanted to sign players like Stevan Jovetic but couldn’t and then he scored against us, seemingly proving your point. Xabi Alonso went renegade. You couldn’t compete with Manchester United. You couldn’t compete with Arsenal. You couldn’t compete with Chelsea.
All fair in the love and war of Liverpool circa 2004-2009. The abomination of Tom Hicks and George Gillett following David Moores’ localised ownership model makes two Champions League finals seem monumental in themselves.
Where you can be critical, frustrated or on the verge of pulling your hair out with Benitez is that it’s usually about what he doesn’t say.
He was in the trenches of the subterfuge with the American ownership, so did he really take the side of one to dig in against Christian Purslow and the other, as has been alleged since?
If money was such an issue, why did precious millions go on Alberto Aquilaini, Glen Johnson, Craig Bellamy, Jermaine Pennant, Fernando Morientes and what is his true ideal around squad building?
Could you have used Robbie Keane differently, better, other than making him symbolic of giving the middle finger to the directors box? (I didn’t like him as a player, for what it’s worth).
Why didn’t you start Didi Hamann in Istanbul or Peter Crouch in Athens? Why was Josemi ever a thing?
There’s a prevailing notion that Rafa remains some kind of masochist. Someone who embroils himself in the stagnation of chaotic club ownership and turmoil.
I found his explanation and ignorance around taking the Everton job staggering. Straight faced, batting off any sense that it was problematic on the part of his Liverpool past, he went one further and stated he was promised £100m to spend.
This was Farhad Moshiri’s Everton, which had already burnt through cash and managers at a rapid pace with FFP warning signs everywhere. At certain points, it’s just all very, well, naive.
There are things I agree with and have tons of sympathy for. He was never given a fair crack at Real Madrid (but then, them’s the breaks). He was right to sell Lucas Digne when he did. Any bigger ego would have left Newcastle floundering in the Championship to protect their CV.
Yet I remain as flummoxed by the man as I’ve ever been. Carragher seemed to want to keep him on the topic of the question, which wasn’t easy. Instead, there were constant tangents and fallen-hero anecdotes about protecting Alex Ferguson from Arsenal fans. He would go from half time in Istanbul to managing Inter Milan without any kind of thread being followed.
I enjoyed some of the things he went into; about being contacted by the England manager to give advice on the Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard issue. About how he approached pressure situations in games or his views on intensity in football currently.
But you can never really settle with Benitez as a listen. That’s fine. Perhaps this is just a media thing. It’s OK to be an elite football manager and not be good on podcasts.
He will always be someone who is seen as a good, honest man at Liverpool. Someone who delivered Liverpool’s most memorable European Cup. A person who found and made Merseyside his home and who made a massive contribution to the Hillsborough Justice Campaign, while also showing such genuine and heartfelt empathy.
He will always remain a bamboozlement of sorts to me. Someone who was at the helm of my only Liverpool hiatus.
I wonder what that says, nothing probably. I’m not sure what I was expecting from the interview. I was left furrowing a brow, as frustrated as Carragher at times.
Looking only forwards, not back.
Buy Dan Morgan’s book ‘Jürgen Said To Me’ on Klopp, Liverpool and the remaking of a city…
