Benitez Surprised at Lack of Contact From FSG

Rafa Benitez has told of his surprise that he was not approached about the Liverpool job in the summer.

The Spaniard, who managed the Anfield club between 2004 and 2010, was not considered for the role left vacant when Kenny Dalglish was sacked in May despite knowing the club inside out.

Launching a new book called ‘Champions League Dreams’, which recalls how Liverpool challenged for European honours during his time there, Benitez, who is currently without a club, said it was ‘strange’ to be overlooked in favour of Brendan Rodgers.

Talking to the Irish Independent, he said: ‘It was strange. We know the club, the players, the Academy and we have even more experience now.

‘The fans were positive about the idea and if you read the book you will understand why. So it was strange not to be approached.’

During his tenure, Liverpool regularly competed in the Champions League and won the competition in 2005, his first season in charge. They also reached the final in 2007 and won the FA Cup in 2006, alongside a succession of top four league finishes.

‘Some people were taking these great games for granted,’ he said. ‘We used to play so many important games that it seemed it was normal and it wasn’t.’

Following a patchy start to the season, as Rodgers tries to introduce a philosophy of attractive, attacking football, some sections of the Liverpool support have suggested owner John W Henry may be as bad as former American chiefs Tom Hicks and George Gillett.

Benitez remembers those days only too well: ‘I was working three years under Hicks and Gillett and it was quite difficult, especially the last year.

‘Ian Ayre [the club’s Managing Director] said Liverpool was close to administration and still we were performing on the pitch. I don’t know how it us under the new owners so I can’t compare.’

Benitez hasn’t been in managerial work since an ill-fated spell at Inter Milan in 2010, but he says ‘it’s a question of time’ before he is on the touchline again. He did, however, refuse to comment on how close he came to the Chelsea job after Andre Villas-Boas was dismissed.

The Times - Rafa Benitez: The Kingmaker.

Think things are bad at Liverpool now? They were worse a little more than three years ago. The club was mired in penury, relations between the manager’s office and the boardroom had broken down completely and Anfield was in a state of open revolt against its American owners.
Liverpool also happened to be ranked, according to Uefa, as the best team in Europe. Over the previous five years, Rafael Benítez’s side had conquered each one of the continent’s most prestigious citadels, winning in San Siro, the Nou Camp and the Bernabéu. They had welcomed all of Europe’s superpowers to Anfield, and beaten each one. They had won one Champions League, and reached the final of another.
In his first memoir, Champions League Dreams, released on Thursday, the Spaniard offers an insight into the key factors that helped him mastermind those victories, the wins that turned this troubled club into the kings of Europe.

Research
Stretching several metres across the wall on the right-hand side of my Melwood office stood shelves and shelves of DVDs. Hundreds upon hundreds of hours of footage, all neatly categorised, organised and numbered so that, after consulting a database on my computer, I could find any film I needed quickly and easily. Aside from my coaching staff, this was my most valuable resource as I attempted to prepare Liverpool’s players during the season: not just a record of all the games I had managed and training sessions I had overseen in my career, but an extensive library of football around the world.
Some of the DVDs contain recordings of games from my days as a youth coach at Real Madrid’s Castilla side. Some of them have footage from Tenerife and Extremadura, and I have film of all of my games at Valencia, too. There are plenty which have been compiled on opponents, on specific players we will have to face and on others who we might like to sign.
Then there are the discs which contain games from leagues from every corner of the globe, not just matches in Spain and Italy, but across Europe, from South America and from Africa too.
There are DVDs that have been prepared with specific players in mind, to showcase a certain aspect of the game. There were some prepared for Jamie Carragher, for example, on how my side at Valencia defended. We would show our players certain clips from other teams to illustrate how we wanted them to play, what we wanted them to do. In later years, as the ideas the coaching staff had introduced sank in and we improved, more and more of the clips we used were not of other teams, but of Liverpool. Seeing themselves excelling in action often gave players more confidence, more motivation, and a clearer idea of their responsibilities and role.

Training
Our season-long training schedule is broken up into micro-cycles of a week, or perhaps 15 days, each one with a specific aim, depending on the time of season: early on, maybe, we will target training to build up stamina, while perhaps later in the campaign our emphasis is on recuperation, or retaining possession, or a technical aspect of the game, such as refining our counter-attacks or honing our patterns of play. Sometimes we plan sessions that present the players with problems they have not encountered before, while at others we try to perfect things we have already worked on.
A typical training session would contain four or five different exercises, each of them lasting around 15 minutes. Take, for example, a morning designed to improve our finishing. We would start with a small-sided possession game, perhaps two against two, keeping the ball away from the players in the middle. Then we would move on to a shooting exercise in small goals, perhaps two players against one defender.
Then perhaps a larger version: three on three, maybe, before finishing off with a game of five-a-side. That could be one touch, two touches or “all-in”, if we are encouraging them to improve their dribbling skills.
Those games are not just a chance to have fun. Often, we would set the teams involved scenarios: one side is a goal up with five minutes to go, say, or both sets of players can only score goals with one touch. If we finish the session with a game of 10 against 10, on a full pitch, perhaps the situation can be more specific: it is the final of the Champions League, one team is leading by a goal to nil with 10 minutes left. What do you do?
It is crucial that as many players as possible are involved at any one time. Most of our sessions are designed for 16, 18 or 20 players, with each one taking a turn before standing aside for someone else, briefly catching their breath, and then going through the exercise again. It is not ideal to have lots of players standing and watching. It is best for them to be enjoying themselves, learning, practising and playing.

Tactics
At the centre of our plan for our away leg against Juventus in 2005 was Xabi Alonso. He had not played since January 1, spending three arduous months recovering from his broken ankle. We knew, though, that we would need him in Turin.
We had targeted this game for his return as soon as we had progressed against Leverkusen in the previous round. He had slowly, steadily, stepped up his recuperation, but he would still be short of match fitness, more fragile than we would like. We would require a system to protect him.
Rather than play in our usual 4-2-3-1 formation, I decided to switch to three central defenders — Carra [Jamie Carragher], [Sami] Hyypia and [Djimi] Traoré — with Steve Finnan and John-Arne Riise deployed as wing backs. In the middle, Xabi would play deep, with Igor Biscan and Antonio Nuñez acting almost as bodyguards, doing the running that he simply was not fit enough to do.
It was imperative, too, that we did not sit too deep. Even on nights like that, when keeping a clean sheet to protect your 2-1 aggregate lead is all you need to do to ensure qualification, I would never encourage my team to sit back, to drop right to the edge of our box. If you play deep, you will make a mistake. My idea is always, always, to push out, to get the ball as far from our goal as possible.
That was our idea, but we had one more trick up our sleeves.
Instead of instructing the team to line up in our specially-designed formation, I told them to play for the first two minutes in the 4-2-3-1 that Fabio Capello and the rest of Juventus’s coaching staff would probably have been expecting.
Only after the game was underway would we move, organically, into the 3-5-1-1. It is a little trick that, sometimes, managers use. Often, if your opponents see you start the game in a different way to the one they had anticipated, they will react, adapting their own system to counteract yours. That is the manager’s job, of course, to change his approach depending on circumstances. If you change after a few minutes, it can look more natural. Sometimes, your rivals will not alter a thing.

Know your opponents
When we played Barcelona in 2007, it was not simply a matter of doing anything we could to stop Lionel Messi. We were just as concerned with how to cope with Ronaldinho. The Brazilian played on the left wing, nominally, but would drift inside, occupying space between the lines.
That would create a problem for Steve Finnan, our right back. If he tracked Ronaldinho, he would leave space for Barcelona’s left back, Gianluca Zambrotta, to exploit. The threat of Barcelona’s No 10, though, was more important. I instructed Finnan to follow his man, to push him, not to allow him a moment to play the sort of penetrating pass which could cut a defence apart.
On the opposite side, we would play Álvaro Arbeloa, signed as recently as January from Deportivo La Coruña, against Messi. It would be Arbeloa’s first start for Liverpool. His opponent was just a teenager, not yet talked of as one of the finest players in history, but it was still one of the more intimidating debuts in world football.
Arbeloa is not the sort of player to get scared, though, and he was confident he could do what was being asked of him. Besides, a manager does not simply come up with an idea and then tell his players about it an hour or so before the game. In Portugal, and upon our return to Melwood, we worked extensively on what we hoped Arbeloa would do.
The principle was relatively simple. Messi, playing wide on the right, favoured cutting inside on his left foot. By playing Arbeloa, naturally right footed, at left back, we would be able to prevent him embarking on those dangerous, slaloming runs. Arbeloa would have to stick close to his man, too, not allowing him to breathe. If Messi has time to turn, he can inflict substantial damage. We had to be on top of him all the time.
We drilled our new, makeshift left back extensively in the days before the game. We prepared DVDs for him so he knew Messi’s movements. In training, we played him at left back, against a left-footed player, to get him used to the job he would have to do in Barcelona.
And we prepared the rest of the team, particularly our defenders, not to use Arbeloa too much when we had possession. The danger of playing a right-footed full back at left back is that he has to turn his body inside to play the ball, which cuts off his options and slows down counter-attacks. It was crucial we did not give him too much of the ball.

The dangers of team-building
In the stands, Steven Gerrard had his hands raised to his head and a look of horror on his face. Beneath him, Dirk Kuyt was catching his breath, trying to stumble to his feet. Peter Crouch was careering round at high speed and with no way of stopping. It was a week before the 2007 Champions League final, and our centre forward had just come within a whisker of running his strike partner over.
We had been advised to travel to the south of Spain, to La Manga, a hotel and resort near to Murcia, for a few days in the build-up to our rematch with AC Milan. We trained twice a day, taking care not to ask too much of the squad. We knew, though, that we could not let the players get bored, so we agreed to let them spend an afternoon go-karting, at a track near the hotel.
It was as they were racing round, at speeds reaching 30 miles an hour, that Crouch suddenly realised his brakes were not working. I was standing, with Kuyt, by a pile of cardboard boxes at the side of the track. Crouch, fearing he would not be able to stop normally, decided to try and crash into the boxes.
He was aiming straight for Kuyt, who had to jump out of the way at the very last second. Crouch thumped into the boxes, came out of the other side and carried on round the track, waiting to get to the straight before jumping out of his kart and rolling away, thankfully unscathed. How he managed to do that, given his height and the small size of the kart, I have absolutely no idea. His knees were pointing out of the kart even before things started to go wrong.
Kuyt dusted himself down and checked he was OK. Gerrard, not involved in the race, waited anxiously to find out if we had lost either one of our forwards to one of the more preventable injuries in football: ruled out of the most important game of their careers by go-karting. Thankfully, Crouch emerged a little sheepish, but physically fine and so, too, was Kuyt.

How I signed Fernando Torres
I knew that we would have to complete the deal as soon as possible, so I flew out at the first available opportunity to Madrid, alongside Rick Parry, to open formal negotiations with Atlético (Madrid). They progressed reasonably well, but after a day we had not quite managed to finalise terms. Rick was resigned to flying back that night. I convinced him to stay on for one more day. “If we don’t do it now, we might lose him for good,” I said.
By the time we returned to Liverpool the following evening, we had the basis of a transfer in place. We would need to get everything signed and sealed as soon as possible, though. I did not want another club to get wind of our interest and try to outbid us. I arranged for Fernando, his agents and his girlfriend, Olalla, to fly to England. We would continue conversations there.
The party was picked up, the next night, at John Lennon Airport, and whisked to a beautiful waterfront apartment in the city, complete with underground parking. Nobody was to know Fernando was in Liverpool. We could not afford for the news to leak out. Only four or five people at the club knew how advanced the deal was, plus a handful of his close associates and the directors at Atlético.
The weather — for that week, at least — was glorious. Liverpool is a particularly wonderful city in the sunshine. From their luxury flat, Fernando and Olalla had a great view across the Mersey and of the city’s skyline.
They would have plenty of time to enjoy it. For two days, they were not permitted to leave the apartment. Their agents would leave, to join us for contractual discussions, and progress was relayed to Fernando on the telephone. He had plenty of work to do, though: as well as providing all of his food from restaurants in the city, we sent him countless books and DVDs of Liverpool’s greatest players and finest moments, descriptions of the club’s history, images of its achievements. For 48 hours, we deluged him with Liverpool’s folklore. And all the time, I spoke with him by phone, telling him how I wanted the team to play, what I wanted him to do, how he could help us win trophies and titles.
Eventually, the deal was done. Fernando was a Liverpool player.
© Rafa Benítez 2012
Extracted from Champions League Dreams by Rafa Benítez with Rory Smith, published by Headline Books on September 13 at £20.