WHEN Rafael Benitez left Valencia – on a journey which today begins to take on some meaning as Liverpool bid to unpick Jose Mourinho’s quest for honours – those players he left behind in Spain were happy to see the back of him. Now, all of a sudden they’re missing him.
Ironically, given Chelsea’s opposition in today’s Carling Cup final at the Millennium Stadium, Claudio Ranieri’s sacking from the Mestalla this week has proven to be the perfect tonic for Rafa.
Visiting Benitez this week at the club’s Mellwood training centre, I heard longstanding Liverpool players already talking about Paco Ayestaran, the club’s fitness coach, being the best they have ever worked under. It is doubly ironic to this intelligent man that his old assistant in Spain, Antonio Lopez, has now been put in temporary charge of Valencia’s bid to rescue their season with a top-four finish in La Liga.
Of course, Benitez is not daft – he knows he faces an almighty struggle to retain the services of his star midfielder, Steven Gerrard. The Spanish coach knows he needs to sign at least four new world-class players – and convince Gerrard to stay. He never misses a chance to remind the Liverpool captain of the positive changes he believes he is bringing to the club. “Morientes, eh! Not bad, Steve?,” he will tease him.
With or without Gerrard, and with or without outside investors, Benítez is convinced Liverpool can attract the funds they badly need to lead the success-starved club back to pre-eminence.
There are real questionmarks over the club’s structure, but the painstaking work he can control, such as rebuilding the club’s scouting network, is the way forward in the short term.
The truth of the matter is that Benítez was not aware of the huge tasks ahead when he signed for Liverpool. He found an imbalanced squad stocked with players of too low a level, too many different nationalities and too few winning reflexes. They were low in spirit, his goalkeepers had obvious problems (injuries in the case of Chris Kirkland, confidence for Jerzy Dudek), and an inherited mismatch up front.
The sum of £12 million had been spent on a player, Djibril Cisse, who did not fit at all into his plans and whose attitude Benitez felt was all wrong. Michael Owen had been transferred to Real Madrid and another, Gerrard, had his mind in London.
With the club’s player database needing rebuilt and very little money available anyway, he soon grasped the scale of the Anfield challenge.
Even so, after applying his scientific approach to football and moving cleverly in the market, his squad has begun to look more solid and he has at least four players he can build a team around – Steven Gerrard, Fernando Morientes (surely worth the same fee as James Beattie), Xabi Alonso and the captain-without-armband, Jamie Carragher.
There have been mistakes along the way – Mauriccio Pellegrino was perhaps not an ideal winter signing, and maybe there was too much expected of Antonio Nunez who, at 23, had not yet broken into the Real Madrid first team.
And then there was the FA Cup, where he made patently the wrong decision to field a team full of reserves against Burnley.
A whole lot more than that indiscretion will be forgiven if they can lift the Carling Cup today. Unlike some of his rivals, the second cup competition holds major importance to Benitez and Liverpool.
Any trophy win obviously lends credibility to his managerial project, but victory would also work as a screen against the press, mainly London-based, who use any bad Liverpool run of defeats to flag the chauvinistic view that foreigners cannot teach England anything about the game.
He believes that triumph in Cardiff would make a world of difference to the climate in which he must operate.
While he has far too much respect for the English game as a whole to imagine a lone march into the Champions League quarter-finals later next week would alter those views, Rafa feels he is slowly generating a measure of reassurance as to Liverpool’s prospects.
Milan Baros, meanwhile, will justifiably harbour mixed feelings when he steps out today charged with the task of breaching Chelsea’s formidable defence and delivering Liverpool a third League Cup triumph in five seasons.
The Czech Republic forward has been here before and while his previous visit two years ago was a professional triumph, on a personal level the occasion ranks as an utter nightmare for the striker.
Thrown into the fray as a 61st-minute substitute, Baros’s big day turned suddenly sour when he himself was replaced moments after Michael Owen had struck to put Liverpool 2-0 up against Manchester United with just four minutes left.
For Baros, the victim of Gerard Houllier’s attempts to run down time, the experience was nothing short of a humiliation and ruined any sense of celebration.
“I had a strange feeling after the game,” he said. “I didn’t celebrate properly after the game, I just thought ‘OK, we have won’. I just went back to the dressing room and then back to the hotel. I was disappointed but hopefully it will be different on Sunday.
“That had never happened to me before in my career. Maybe when I was about 17, I was taken off because I was injured, but never coming on and being taken off again for no reason. I couldn’t believe it when I saw the number come up on the board, I thought it was a mistake. But what can I say? It was a horrible feeling. Especially with it being 2-0, two minutes before the end when nothing can happen.”
Baros is not the only Liverpool player with a point to prove as Rafael Benitez’s side hope to become the latest to unpick Chelsea’s bid for honours. Harry Kewell has endured a torrid time since joining the club including this week’s public row between Benitez and the player’s agent over his fitness levels.
But the Australian accepts the time has finally come for him to deliver on his undeniable talent. “I haven’t played in a World Cup finals so there are a lot of things I haven’t done or achieved yet and I have to start achieving these things,” Kewell said. “You change clubs and sometimes it comes off straight away and other times it takes longer which is happening to me. But I am looking forward to getting back up to the level I should be.”
Benitez insists he will stand by keeper Jerzy Dudek for today’s showcase despite the Pole’s midweek blunder against Bayer Leverkusen.
“When you have made a mistake the most important thing is to recognise you have made a mistake and look at how you can rectify that mistake,” the manager said. “He will play.”
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