The Improbables
the sunday times
Liverpool have produced heroics in the Champions League, but it will take a superhuman display on Tuesday to deny Juventus
Last year’s super hero story was The Incredibles, about an ordinary lot who threw off their everyday guises to perform unlikely feats and marvels. Now meet The Improbables, a different bunch but whose story is the same. In their normal life as a Premiership football team Liverpool plod through the season unobtrusively. Stick them in Europe, however, and their muscles bulge, out jut their jaws, and on go the special suits. By day they are a crew who cannot overpower Birmingham, Blackburn or Southampton. By night, when that Champions League music heralds their transformation at 7.45pm, Bayer Leverkusen, Monaco and Deportivo La Coruña flee in defeat.
To triumph on Tuesday, however, The Improbables require their biggest miracle yet. Juventus come to Anfield with two World Cup winners, three Champions League winners, a European footballer of the year, the planet’s most expensive goalkeeper, and the current captain of Brazil within their ranks. Liverpool meet them minus £52m worth of weaponry, due to injuries and the fact that Fernando Morientes and Mauricio Pellegrino are cup-tied. While Fabio Capello celebrated the return from injury of Pavel Nedved, Rafael Benitez spoke on Friday with mild enthusiasm about Djimi Traore and Stephen Warnock being fit again after knocks.
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“We’re the underdogs but we’ll give it a good go. We’ll get into them,” said Steven Gerrard. “We’ve done really well to get this far in the Champions League but we want to get into the last four.”
Benitez agreed that “Juventus are favourites”. He said: “Italian teams are the most dangerous in this competition. They have experience, they are good in defence and they play good counter-attacks. They know the [Champions League] game and for me, Juventus are not just an Italian team, but maybe the best of them.”
Yet he also talked about having perhaps spotted “some weaknesses” among Nedved, Fabio Cannavaro, Alessandro Del Piero and Co. If he can exploit these it will have to be while overcoming weaknesses of Liverpool’s own.
On top of Morientes’s absence, various strains, breaks and pulls deprive Benitez of Djibril Cisse, Harry Kewell, Neil Mellor and Florent Sinama-Pongolle, leaving the manager contemplating playing Gerrard up front, a decision complicated by the fact that with Xabi Alonso and Dietmar Hamann out, Gerrard is also badly needed in central midfield.
“We’re short all over and there may be a chance I’ll have to play up front,” said Gerrard. “I’m not totally comfortable there but wherever the manager asks me to play I’ll give it my best shot. The injuries this season have been a joke.”
Scouse comedy can be biting, though, and in previous rounds Liverpool’s ability to make light of their problems has been, well, improbable. In the first leg of their knockout tie against Leverkusen, Gerrard was suspended, yet into the telephone box lumbered Igor Biscan and out of it emerged a wonder-player to inspire a victory. Requiring three second-half goals versus Olympiakos to progress from the group stage Mellor and Pongolle, without a previous strike in the Champions League between them, leapt off the bench to help Gerrard do the heroics. “You cannot do anything about injuries. Against Juventus we cannot change our situation, only work harder,” Benitez said.
The manager’s attitude is, perhaps, key to why Liverpool are still standing despite having so many individual players struck down. At Valencia, he won the Spanish league in 2002 without a single one of his players scoring more than seven goals. The team was the thing, and continues to be for this manager. “The team is more important than individuals,” said Benitez. “Always. You cannot win with fantastic players and a bad team. If you win it normally means you have a good team and good players. You can have stars, but you need a strong team around them.”
In an interview last month for the official Champions League magazine, Benitez identified this philosophy as being in tune with his club’s traditions. “My challenge is to find, teach and inspire the old Liverpool spirit. In the past Liverpool teams hunted as a pack. They were a true team. The team was the star,” he said.
In this context the ever-distracting personal saga involving Gerrard and his future, has been especially tiring for Benitez, though the player did have something hopeful, from Liverpool’s point of view, to say about the matter.
“People are assuming that I’ve already made my mind up to leave and that’s not true. I’ll discuss my future at the end of the season,” the captain said. He added that “the Champions League is what we live for as players”, and if he should leave he would not be able to argue it was because his boss at Liverpool lacked aptitude in the competition. Gerrard would have to concede that he has made progress under Benitez. Whether he plays up front against Juventus or not, Liverpool will be set up to give him opportunities to attack and his tally of 12 goals, for club and country, already represents his best ever for a season.
Benitez, like Jose Mourinho, admits to being inspired by Arrigo Sacchi, whom he terms “the greatest coach of the modern era”. Sacchi’s all-conquering AC Milan side of the late 1980s featured talents such as Ruud Gullit and Marco van Basten but was, above everything else, a team. “I’ve heard people talking about Jose Mourinho and myself ‘reinventing’ football but I find that hugely over-exaggerated. Mourinho and I simply recovered the values of the ‘collective’,” Benitez said. First as Sacchi’s assistant and then as his successor, Capello was also a devotee.
“He has similar ideas,” said Benitez. “He did a very good job in Milan and speaking as a Madrileno, I know what a good job he did at Real Madrid.”
When Benitez took a year-long sabbatical to study others’ coaching methods, one of the first places he visited was Milan where he shadowed Capello for three days. “Though three days is not a long time you can get to know what mentality a person has,” Benitez said.
At Real Madrid, where Sacchi is now director of football, they may view Liverpool versus Juventus as a recruitment test. Capello is the favourite to be offered the manager’s job at the Bernabeu this summer, Benitez, though he maintained on Friday he would like to stay in England “for 15 years”, the second favourite.
He will be hoping for a better experience than in his last encounter with an Italian club. Internazionale eliminated Valencia at the Champions League quarter-final stage in 2003 despite being roundly outplayed in both legs. Inter counter-attacked their way to an aggregate victory playing so defensively they “killed football” according to Benitez at the time. “We had 35 shots and scored two goals,” he remembered. “It was impossible.”
Beating Juventus is not Mission Impossible, but Mission Improbable, certainly.
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