The club were in a dire situation, crippled by former owners and left lifeless by a manager who was clearly out of his depth. The media were claiming that Roy Hodgson had lost the faith of the fans, but I’m not sure he ever had it. I certainly don’t ever remember singing his name on the Kop.

During his first tenure in charge of Liverpool Dalglish guided them to three league titles (runners up twice) and won the FA Cup twice (runners up once) in only five seasons. He retired in 1991 on health grounds following the Hillsborough disaster.

Twenty years on and he finally has an opportunity ‘to repay the club and the fans’ as he puts it. As I write this article the club have moved from the relegation places to fifth in the Premier League in four months, thanks to 10 league wins and only three defeats from 16 games.

The atmosphere at the club and attitude of the players has been transformed and we are seeing the results on the pitch.

A 5-2 victory over Fulham, described by Dalglish as a ‘fantastic performance’ shows how far Liverpool have come in such a short time. Surely its only a matter of days before King Kenny gets the permanent manager job which he richly deserves.

When the BBC reporter asked Dalglish after the Fulham result: ‘Fifth place with two games left. Surely you must be happy?’, Kenny’s response was perfect…

‘No, I want to be first’

I wrote earlier this evening that if Hodgson were to be appointed, I’d find it a fairly uninspiriting decision not entriely motivated by football – that his ‘safe pair of hands’ label is really a way of saying he won’t interfere with the shambolic running of our club. It has since been brought to my attention by Richard Buxton that Hodgson’s time in Italian football was not quite as smooth as I may have suggested, seeing as one of the reasons for his departure from Udinese was a disagreement with his bosses.

I’d suggest that Hodgson has since calmed down as a manager and would not risk losing his first huge job in many years by annoying the board. But, that he is capable of upsetting big wigs is important to me. Whilst what I would ideally like to see is a manager come in and easily take us back into the top 4, such a situation is highly unlikely. I would like the next manager to be able to take on the owners – but only after having cemented himself as popular with the fans. Would the owners really move on another enormously popular but dissenting manager? Maybe, but it’d hurt them if they did.

And so we hit another issue. Roy is not popular. He is seen by many as soft and medicore, and to be fair, it is easy to see why. So he will not be in a position to take on Broughton or Purslow or the Americans for a very long time, if ever at all. Thus even if he did have a bit more revolutionary fire in his belly than I first thought, it wouldn’t really matter anyway.

I’ll be back with more on Roy tomorrow.

And if, as reports last week suggested, Kenny himself quite fancies the job if his mate Roy Hodgson doesn’t get it, then I’m afraid I’m not feeling very optimistic about the recruitment process. If Dalglish and whoever else is involved in the search can seriously only manage to come up with Hodgson and Pellegrini, then I’m completely dismayed. They’re not bad managers, but where’s the invention, where’s the imagination?

Which brings me to my next point. I think the reason we aren’t seeing the most exciting young managers being linked to Liverpool is that the whole recruitment process is being driven by the horrible myth that LFC needs ‘a safe pair of hands’. I roughly translate that, from the corporate management lingo employed so often by the men running our club, into ‘a guy we can control’. Benitez fell out with the board because he could not abide Liverpool’s off-pitch woes having a detrimental effect on-pitch, as they so often did; I believe he was so obsessed with attempting to control such things that he eventually lost focus and could not have possibly committed 100% of his time to the team alone. He made such a fuss for a very good reason: the football club he loved and wanted to manage for years to come was being torn apart, very slowly and deliberately, by men principally interested in the weight of their wallets. Those same men got their way when they eventually forced the ailing Rafa out – and now they want to install a puppet.

I don’t think they want to pick the team, but they do want to control the squad financially – which means selling players as they see fit, in accordance with the figures on the balance sheet. They want to be able to muck about with the future of the club without their manager challenging them. As much as I appreciate that King Kenny’s main aim will surely be to look after the club’s best interests, I’m not sure if any man could possibly prevent Broughton from getting what he and his American paymasters want. Hodgson, I believe, is seen as a ‘safe pair of hands’ because he’s worked under difficult Chairmen (Inter, Fulham) and almost always towed the party line. Surely his record in football can’t be held up as a reason for employing him, as it is utterly mediocre, particularly on the occasions when he was given a chance at a big club.

Pellegrini showed he was able to work obediently under the tyrannical reign of Perez at Real Madrid, leading the team to its highest league points total in history. But he did eventually speak out about the fact that the club sold Robben and Sneijder against his wishes, and openly criticized his President for being aloof and misguided. Those outbursts, which I see as brave and honest reactions to impossible working conditions (similar to those infrequently made by Benitez), will actually count against him in the search for LFC’s new manager. That’s a horrible shame.

Still, whilst I see Pellegrini as a more stable and suitable footballing candidate than Hodgson (or Dalglish for that matter, who I don’t want to see return after so long out of the game, and after what he managed to mess up at Blackburn all those years ago), I do not agree that the ‘safe pair of hands’ is what Liverpool needs. ‘Safe pair of hands’ is just a by-word for quiet mediocrity, gradual stagnation. We need new life and long-term hope on the pitch, a vision, something exciting. We need a coach who wants us to play good football but also who is in it for the long run. We need a coach who can silently watch Broughton and co. at the top, and have the backbone to speak out when he sees fit. We need, in other words, exactly what we won’t get.

If we don’t appoint somebody else in the meantime, I’ll write about who my top picks are later this week. But for now, I leave you with the thought that the men in charge of picking our next manager do not have footballing motivations at the top of their list of priorities. They’ll be looking for a marionette with strings leading all the way up to Anfield’s boardroom. Things are only going to get worse.

Note the rose-tinted glasses re: Parry… and the subsequent irony.

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El Salvador: Benitez

Customarily, successful football managers are adored and admired by their club’s fans. It is a natural way of life: if you win trophies, you earn support, and you simultaneously spawn an army of loyal followers who would go as far as calling you ‘Tollah’ and hoisting your portrait into the air in a show of faithfulness. In Cardiff last year, despite stuttering league form and an exit from the FA Cup to the woeful Burnley, thousands of Reds fans did just that in anticipation of the Carling Cup final clash with Chelsea. Rafa Benitez admitted afterwards that such demonstrations of support for his position were surprising, especially from whence he came: “In Valencia, it took the fans 3 years to sing my name and by then I’d won the League title twice and the UEFA Cup,” the Spaniard admitted to journalists after the match.

Indeed, Valencia’s fans must gave been as stubbornly expectant (despite not wining the League in 30 years before Benitez’s arrival) as their President, who incredibly told Benitez in his third season that if he lost another match his job would probably be up for grabs. That was on the same night that the manager had just delivered his second League title, and was surely one of the reasons for his eventual summer departure. Benitez was embroiled in a separate, rather public battle with another member of the board during his reign and for a time after – Sporting Director Jesus Garcia Pitarch – over issues involving transfers and wage structure, and, after Benitez left, his apparent betrayal of the Valencia team. “He’s the kind of man who would suck you absolutely dry,” Benitez was quoted as saying just before he joined Liverpool.

In truth, Rafael Benitez was treated awfully during his time at the club, even in the face of his unbelievable success and maturing reputation as a fantastic coach, manager and person. Pitarch, ever the undiplomatic, told Benitez that having finished 5^th in his second season in charge, he would have even less control over possible signatures during that particular close-season. The manager requested defenders, and Pitarch introduced another striker, setting off spectacular fireworks and igniting a battle which caused Benitez, in the end, to admit defeat during a press conference in Spain.

“I want to see it as positive that the club has tried to keep me on, but after the events of this season which have undermined my morale I have decided to reconsider my future at the club. I want to thank all the players, the employees at Valencia, the press and especially the fans for their support over the past three years.” Benitez famously broke into tears in the middle of this emotional speech and had to leave the conference room in a kind of awed silence. The then-President, Jaime Orti, did have his bust-ups with the manager but had tried fairly hard to keep him at the club in the end. In failing, Orti was left not only angered but humiliated and subsequently refused to give Benitez a settlement package due to the fact that it had been the manager’s decision to depart from the club.

Benitez’s reaction to Orti’s child-like behaviour was calm, but as always, firm: “I get packages and tributes in Almendralejo, Tenerife and Parla (where he coached previously) and yet in Valencia, where I have won more titles and I have left a lasting impression, I have to go back there to deal with a lawsuit,” he said. “The problem was brought about with the club deciding to withhold my settlement fee that was agreed after the completion of my contract and which is sacred to any worker.” Mid-way through the legal battle however, Orti was ousted as President by a board dissatisfied with his failure to satiate Benitez and Juan Soler took over, easing the pressure slightly on the Benitez vs. Valencia situation.

Yet even Soler, in the hot seat and quite happy to sit down and discuss a settlement with Benitez, could not undo the spiteful work of Orti and Rafa conceded, “He (Soler) doesn’t know how to stop it; he has been overcome by this situation. Both lawyers have spoken to each other and it appeared things were speeding up but they don’t know how to find a way out.” And so, even signing a 5-year deal with Liverpool FC in the summer of 2004, Rafael Benitez was still hampered by an ongoing, rampant lawsuit which ate up a lot of his time and thoughts and money. Contrarily, what a relief it must have been for the man when he met Rick Parry in Spain following his resignation and realised that control freakery simply would not be on the cards if he joined the mighty and willing Liverpool, one of the biggest and most successful clubs the world has ever seen.

What Benitez came from, a club full of egotistical old-suits collected over the 30 years of dryness and continuing to collect now in the dry patch which has followed Benitez’s reign, was surely a hell to put up with day after day. Yes, what Benitez loved was that he inherited a well-drilled team which worked hard and knew what he wanted, but off-field politics are not enjoyed by the Spaniard, who would rather be at home with his family than in a board meeting discussing whether or not he will choose which players to sign for his team this year. Players like Albelda, Baraja, Ayala, Marchena, Vicente, Mista, even Aimar; they are all big names but not by any means superstars, and they work hard to earn their money in exactly the way Benitez appreciates. But when he had to leave the training pitch and spend time playing second fiddle to Orti and his cronies, Benitez must surely have been wishing for a more liberal, hospitable regime under which he could work.

And his work was certainly impressive, at times devastatingly so. Benitez’s footballing philosophies exist within his own mind and of course those of his coaching staff and players, but it is surely possible to discern what this man is all about by analyzing what he has done to the Liverpool team since his arrival – and, relatively, what kind of Valencia team he left behind in Spain. ‘The Crushing Machine,’ they were called, grinding out result after result without the arrogance or contemptuousness of Real Madrid. Albelda and Baraja were the ruinous midfielders, breaking down moves with the occasional help of Ayala and Marchena. Valencia’s key idea would be not to concede a goal and then attack upon that basis; Vicente, Rufete, Aimar and Mista were Benitez’s spearhead and could penetrate most teams in most matches. Indeed, the lack of fast, tricky wingers is what has caused the boss to do things slightly differently with Liverpool.

The Anfield tactics appear to be all about controlling matches, something which Xabi Alonso, one of Liverpool’s best signings in the last couple of decades, helps to achieve. Keep the ball, stay solid with Sissoko, Carragher and Hyypia, and then progress using the power of Gerrard and prowess of players such as Garcia and Kewell to supply the strikers from both the wings an the middle.

Benitez dislikes having similar strikers and has accordingly bought players up front who give us very different options to what we already had; Baros was sold for being too similar (‘a runner’) to Cisse and replaced with the now-irreplaceable Peter Crouch, who is good in the air, on the floor, and at holding up the ball. Fernando Morientes, frustrating though he is, can contribute with his head and is an excellent passer, although he is not the natural goalscorer we all perhaps expected. That natural goalscorer, admittedly, is still lacking from the squad and many observers still critisise the Liverpool manager for not moving for Michael Owen – who’s to say there isn’t one on the way in January, though? Along with that winger with pace and back-up for Sami Hyypia, Benitez could now truly begin to feel right at home with his team as it begins to radiate more and more similarities to the old Valencia.

A ‘relationship where (the chairman) understands (Benitez) and (Benitez) understands (the chairman)’ is what Moores recently said in description of his relationship with the Liverpool manager. Parry also gets along well with Rafa, who is allowed to sign the players he wants and will be allocated sufficient funds in January with which to do so. This overwhelming trust between manager and board, despite being the element often stated in explanation of Gerard Houllier’s downfall, is essential at any club and Liverpool fans should be relieved that Parry and Moores have remained just as trusting of their manager, even after Houllier’s insistence on £10 million for Diouf and £11 million for Heskey. It is almost certain that Orti or Pitarch would never have allowed a £7 million check to leave The Mestalla in return for lanky Peter Crouch, yet look at how much the big man has sharpened our team; these are the reasons, along with the aforementioned magnificent fans, for Rafa’s declaration last season that “I want to be here for 20 years.”

The exciting thing is that Benitez’s Valencia team, which won the League twice in 3 years, was as good as it was after only those 3 seasons. If Benitez is given the time he desires, just imagine where this club might go: look at the scale and amount of improvement already shown this season, especially away from home, and consider what could happen if that growth is allowed to run on for years to come. Liverpool are the chance for Benitez to show the footballing world what a team managed by him really looks like, not after 1 year or 3 years, but after 5 or 10 or 20, and with the proper amount of money in his hand each summer and New Year. I can’t see the man being denied this awesome opportunity, do you? Already, he has taken the club to the League Cup and World Club finals and has won the European Cup – yes, the Champions League – and the European Super Cup in his first season. Take into account that Benitez, before that, won the Spanish League twice and the UEFA Cup (the first man to take a team to the UEFA Cup and European Cup in consecutive seasons but with different teams), and you begin to understand the potential that this manager actually contains.

Plus, the integrity of Rafael Benitez as a person cannot be doubted. He is polite, has none of the Mourinho arrogance, always shows the utmost respect to other teams and is always up for a laugh. He also ensured that his children settled in last year and buys his wife an expensive piece of jewelry every time he brings home a winners medal. He missed his father’s funeral in order to help his team and, despite being incredibly emotional after Liverpool’s incredibly unlucky Tokyo defeat, still resounded completely with the term ‘gentleman.’ This leads me on to believe that he is a man of his word, and would not leave Liverpool for the open Real Madrid job – at least not at the current time anyway.

The position at Madrid is currently ridiculously controversial and if you hold on to the job for more than a year, it’s a real effectuation. Benitez is obviously intelligent and will probably wait until the situation at the club has settled, and first team, but flailing, players such as Raul and Zidane – who must be played in order to avoid the President’s wrath – have moved on. The Spaniard, I admit, won’t be at Liverpool forever. He supported Madrid as a boy, spent years and years learning his trade there as ‘B’ team coach and is aware that his late father did one day dream of seeing his son at Real. But Liverpool, for the time being and foreseeable future, is his adopted home and we fans shall love him for as long as he stays; success is never too far away with Benitez and in placing our faith in this man, we are effectively placing our faith in sheer, guaranteed triumph itself.

He is El Salvador of Liverpool: Rafael Benitez.

At a time when politicians are being forced to work together to forge an uncomfortable alliance, is it time for Merseyside’s two giant football clubs to do the same? The plans discussed above would have Everton and Liverpool sharing a ‘Siamese’ stadium, with two individual grounds existing side by side but sharing a central connecting ‘spine’.

Why do it? Well, the business group suggesting the unique blueprint says that Liverpool and Everton could save up to £220 million by joining forces; each team would still have an individual stadium; the project could be completed by 2013. What to make of this bizarre concept?

My own thoughts have ranged widely – when I first read the article I dismissed the ideas within as ludicrous; on reflection, the ‘double stadium’ would be a magnificent structure and, if anything, would make the Merseyside rivalry more fierce than it already is – without taking away either club’s individual ‘home turf’.

Of course, I’ve reflected once again and now am firmly against the idea. I want Liverpool FC to have its own stadium, like all of the world’s other top clubs – I can’t imagine many other teams with the stature of LFC accepting such a plan. The ‘twin’ stadiums suggested above would likely have a very limited amount of variability from one to the other and, quite honestly, I’d rather stay at Anfield and lose revenue than spend big on a shared stadium that we’d almost definitely eventually tire of.

There’s a reason that Siamese twins usually want to have surgery – two individual entities can’t exist together forever. And if they do manage it, then they often blend into one… I don’t think anybody can face that idea.

What do you think?

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Come and follow me on Twitter at https://www.twitter.com/JRoache89

United have long been the dominant force in English football; the fact that they still haven’t won more league titles than us (despite our failure to finish top for two decades) is only testament to how good we used to be. If we beat or draw with Chelsea on Sunday, as I hope we can, then Ferguson’s boys will be favourites to win the race yet again. And if they do take number 19, they’ll deserve it, no arguments. Yes, they’ve had some luck over the years, they’ve had some decisions go their way – but they’ve also been the best team around for as long as I can remember (I wasn’t born in time to see our ‘legendary’ teams). As this season has shown, they remain far more likely to take number 19 before we do anyway, no matter how much optimism last season had instilled in us. I don’t think I’m being defeatist so much as I’m being realistic about it – and as Liverpool fans we have to focus on what’s best for the future of our great club, not what’s best for the past.

Imagine asking Carragher to put a little less effort in. Tell Reina not to command his area so much. Tell Kuyt not to run quite as far this time. It’s a joke. What if we lose to Chelsea and then they go and muck it up on the final day? What if it turns out that our rivals for fourth all completely bottle it and leave us with an opportunity to steal in at the last? Anybody who would still place United’s destiny above Liverpool’s in terms of importance is past being a fan: they’ve become a United anti-fan, nothing else. I think we’ve all had our moments; when Robben (a man I hate, incidentally) scored that stunner at Old Trafford a few weeks back, I was running around the living room. But I celebrated far more for Gerrard’s brace against lowly Burnley on Sunday – and that’s how we have to be, if we aren’t going to lose sight of what’s really important here: L F C.

Would a better solution not be to play the man for whom he paid £20 million in the summer, a player who we all thought would be pivotal to our ‘title challenge’ this season when he was bought? I have to say that this habit of Benitez’s is the one I cannot stand: he goes through phases of relentless conservatism, insisting on playing two defensive midfielders when our wide areas are hardly the most creative and our stand-in strikers are completely unable to hold up the ball. Rafa is unapologetically relying on Steven Gerrard to do something, and on the evidence of this season, that just isn’t going to happen. It doesn’t strike me as particularly fair to the captain either, considering how much pressure it puts on his shoulders. He cannot be expected to come good every time.

Sam Allardyce is a man I have no respect for in any sense; you only have to browse through previous blog entries to confirm that much. His comments in the media today are clearly exaggerated and meant to irritate Benitez ahead of Sunday’s game – for one thing, there’s no way that we’ve become like Bolton. But I’m not going to defend Benitez entirely; when he’s under pressure, he doesn’t try to make us play football. Beating City last week would have been the perfect moment to push on and wrest fourth place back from the pretenders, but we went there, knowing that City would be defensive, and decided to counter their tactics with defensive, turgid football. Lucas and Mascherano are good players but they really don’t have the cutting edge going forward (yes, I did see Mascherano’s goal the other day and based on past attempts, that’s a one in a hundred occurrence). Aquilani could have been played to give us a creative edge, to encourage us to pass, to lend support to the ailing Gerrard; but he was nowhere to be seen.

The idea that a game might ever be ‘too physical’ for a player is very annoying to me. The best players are often not the biggest and they manage to cope; all it takes is their manager’s confidence and a team around them which is willing to pass along the ground without panicking. We did that a lot last season, and whilst the football often wasn’t to Arsenal’s highest standard, it was a joy to watch the movement and verve running through the team. It seems obvious to me that the teams who finish in the top four will be the ones with the most quality; so why aren’t we actively trying to prove that we belong in that category? A big opportunity comes tomorrow against Blackburn and Allardyce; if Rafa doesn’t play a footballing team – one which includes Aquilani in a key role (doesn’t he deserve such a chance) – then I’ll be sick to my stomach. I don’t want to go to Anfield to see an expensive Liverpool team thumping it up the pitch and hoping for the best. It’ll get us nowhere.

The truth is that we made them look like a top ten premiership club, and we were completely terrified of playing against them. This is ultimately an indictment of Benitez: he has had an extended period in which to prepare his players, make them feel like the team which finished second in the league last season and thrashed Real Madrid 5-0 on aggregate. But the players look despondent at the moment.

Gerrard, for one, is a player slowly fading into the background. I have no doubt that this is due to injury. Torres is scared to run or exert himself and looks a shadow of the player he was in his first year with us, despite the odd moment of greatness this season. To cap it all off, they are now injured. Who will step forward and take responsibility?

Mascherano was beginning to look decent again before his ref card against rotten bottom club Pompey (who we played a defensive team against and lost 2-0). But he isn’t capable of inspiring a team, he hasn’t got any ability moving forward. Kuyt, so solid and dependable last year, is looking like he’s on the other side of the hill these days. Benayoun is injured. Reina can only do so much from the net. Carra looks increasingly weary, Johnson is injured, our left backs are average, Skrtel and Agger have forgotten how to play, Ngog sadly misses more than he hits.

Aquilani did quite well against Reading I thought, smooth passer, slick when he wants to be, but ultimately not used to playing in our team, in our footballing culture. Which leaves his partner, Lucas, as our main man. And, in all fairness, he’s been our best player this season.

Imagine anybody admitting such a thing a few months ago? But Lucas is tackling, passing and running his way into my good books, much more so than any of the senior players.

The problem is that, when everybody else was playing well last year, Lucas looked average. Now that the chips are down, he’s showing himself to be our battler from Brazil, able to combine hard work with good form. But it is a horrible thing to think that Lucas is carrying our team. He isn’t creative or dynamic enough to hold such a mantle. Yet Rafa is turning to him to sort things out; the non-appearance of Aquilani was surely in part down to Benitez’s fear that leaving Lucas out of the team would remove its core and upset the balance. We’ve gone from the beating heart of our team being Alonso, who dominated games and got the team to play football, to it being Lucas Leiva, a solid defensive midfielder who salvages tricky situations. That says it all really.

Rafa is calm in a storm, but I think these days he’s almost becoming oblivious to the thunder clouds overhead. Has he ever had to take a team out of such a crisis of identity, of confidence? No, certainly not. And his managerial abilities – tactical, logical, insightful – are not what we need right now. I’ve been a staunch supporter of his ever since his arrival and I still don’t want to see him sacked. But he is being tested now – is he a truly, truly great manager, capable of inspiring his team’s victories for once instead of ‘masterminding’ them? Can he change tack and adapt to the dire situation in which he finds himself or is he determined to revel in his stubbornness, his belief in his own methods, his determination that if he carries on doing ‘the right things’ and ‘working hard’, everything will come good?

Because it surely won’t. The problems the team are having are not all his fault – God knows I’ve slated the board and the players enough times in the past. But his fault or not, the situation remains as it is, and his job now, for which he is paid a lot of money, is to make sad, bad players play like happy, good ones. And we’ll see where we are in the summer.

http://www.skysports.com/story/0,19528,11669_5797004,00.html

An annoying businessman-politician with no idea about the actual game of football, Cook appears to have some serious insecurities following the sacking of Mark Hughes. Maybe it’s because he knows the decision is an absolute joke, that Hughes was well on-target for his club’s season objective of a top 6 finish (and had also set up a Carling Cup semi with United); it just seems to me that City have been itching to have a manager with a foriegn, important-sounding name ever since the sacking of Sven. Roberto Mancini meets their requirements, but you have to ask why it’s taken so long for the bloke to get a job – he’d been lingering around on the gossip pages for well over a year before being employed by the Premier League’s joke club.

Cook is mentioning us in his little interviews because he knows that he looks stupid and wants us to look stupid with him. Cheers mate, but we have enough problems of our own; the last thing we need is you stuttering on about how we wanted this loser Mancini. Just shut your corporate gob, get your head down and start thinking about what your next ridiculous action will involve – but make sure it doesn’t involve Liverpool.