KopTalk.com Forums Football Liverpool FC Forum Rafa interview on BBC

Best win ratio,best points tally,most goals scored,numerous golden gloves for our keeper,number 1 european club side,1 European cup,1 FA cup does not seem like bad management to me?
You basing your argument on one bad season?

anyone with any footballing intuition knows that despite what stats can be pulled together to paint a picture there are many undeniable facts.

If raffa had of been a better man manager and played a better brand of football, noone would have wanted to leave.

last season wasnt just a bad season, it was raffa in total control of the club and it was virtually impossible to support the performances of a depressed, negative and confused squad.

his team selections, strategies, tinkering were insane. it wasnt about the players he couldnt buy, it was about what he did with the players he had.

It's all in the past ... He used to drive me mad, but the important thing is that the likes of him and Ged were truly won over by the club, it's supporters etc and they will forever love the place. The pair of them used to drive me insane - their transfers, tactics, excuses ...... but they're not coming back and I like to look upon them are two big fans of the club.

no of course not muj and that was never what i tried to suggest. would love to see you play though! what position? goalkeeper?

just behind the goal keeper swede .im cool that way

... In the transfer market.

That's what everyone including the media and even red fans claim.

I can't get around how that statement is even half valid.

With the sale of judas to chavs for 50m, Alonso for 30m and masch for 24m, that's more than 100m quid inflow to the club for just 3 players. He bought the 3 of them for 48m quid. Sold after giving us a few solid years of service to the club. That's fantastic returns in my books.

Just think - which LFC manager consistently made money for the club? None!

Rafa is the only LFC manager who has nett gain in transfers for the club!

Even his so-called big flop buy Aquilani is now proving his worth at Juventus and we should recoup our initial outlay for him. Most of the other players who didn't make it were also sold with not much loss in value.

So tell me, how can rafa's record be dreadful???

Rafa is a legend,football is a lie!However i would rather talk about the 31 pass goal we scored at Wolves.

In case you're all wondering, because it took me a day & a half to realise what comment #37 was (now you see why I don't post much). Here it is in full.




I agree with those saying Rafa was atrocious in the transfer window, as the combined 103 million pounds return on Mascherano, Alonso and Torres testifies.

On top of that Benitez has wasted 6 million on the dreadful Pepe Reina, who is now clearly worth less than that. Same goes for the awful Daniel Agger who Benitez splurged a further 6.5m on, and Martin Skrtel, who at another 6 million must be one of the most expensive defenders in world football, and is not as good as Rio Ferdinand who cost only fractionally more.

Then you have players like Yossi Benayoun, who whilst scoring several hat-tricks and being sold for a profit to Chelsea, was total rubbish. And Glen Johnson, who although he may have cost less than five separate Chelsea full backs, is - wait for it - suspect defensively.

The signing of Momo Sissoko was another disaster. Sold two years later for a profit to buy Mascherano. And Peter Crouch, who whilst becoming an England regular at Liverpool, was eventually sold at a profit along with Craig Bellamy, also sold at a profit, to buy Fernando Torres, who turned out to be total pigswill.

What really gets my goat though is Benitez's uncontrollable spending on the likes of Josemi for 2million pounds which is a huge amount of money in modern football, or Andrea Dossena, who ended up being sold at a enormous loss of 1 million pounds and replaced by the disastrous Insua, who Benitez irresponsibly splashed zero pounds on.

His crazy spending, reaching almost a third that of Chelsea who he finished above and had a better record in Europe than, continued with the gargantuan mistake that was Aquilani, a player injured for most of last season, then loaned out to Juve this season, where he has been the best midfielder in Serie A.

It's all very well these Liverpool fans saying he won more games, won more points, had a better record in Europe than any Liverpool manager since Dalglish, but he's rubbish don't you know? The Champions league was a total fluke, as demonstrated by a continual failure to get anywhere near the latter stages ever again post 2005. He only won the CL in 2005 because he was bequeathed great players from his predecessor like Smicer, Traore, Biscan, Kewell, Baros, Cisse (all played in Istanbul) - along with the likes of Cheyrou, Murphy, Diao, Diomede and others. He didn't have clue what he was doing - he just bagged multiple very flukey wins in Europe against the likes of Barca, Real Madrid, Inter, Juve, Chelsea, Milan and others.

Finally, what annoyed me most about Benitez was his defensive tactics. Whilst it is true to say that Liverpool scored more goals than any other side in England in 2008-09, including beating Real Madrid 4-0 and United 4-1 at OT, they were still just so defensive, all because they had two holding midfielders. So they scored over 100 goals! Big deal!! Defensive!

Rafa needs to learn how to spot up and coming talent on the cheap like Wayne Rooney, Rio Ferdinand, Michael Carrick, Nani, Anderson, Owen Hargreaves, Juan Veron and Dimitar Berbatov. Ok, so maybe Chelsea spent more than Benitez during his tenure by about 4 to 1, but he's still rubbish. He spent 10 million on Dirk Kuyt, who whilst having an impressive goals and assists record, and being one of the stars of World Cup 2010, is still a very poor player. And by the way, Benitez is very lucky that he had more players at the World Cup than any other English side. Another fluke!

How managers like Steve Bruce and Harry Redknapp would love to have had some money to spend on players, instead of making do with the peanuts they are allowed to spend on the likes of Kenwyne Jones, Darren Bent, or David Bentley - all far better than the foreign players Benitez signed.

I agree with ShefieldHarry, who rightly points out that Benitez should go and try managing a mid range club instead of crazy high spending teams like Liverpool. I'd like to see Rafa go abroad to somewhere like Spain and see how he does against the likes of Barca or Real on a shoestring. See how he likes that.

Benitez should also look at Arsene Wenger for a lesson in how to win trophies properly. I don't care that the two sides that have exponentially outpent every other team, Chelsea and United, have won the league every single year since 2004, Benitez is still dreadful.

The problems Roy Hodgson had were nothing to do with his tactics. It's all because he was left bad players. Benitez got lucky with that set of bad players over the course of several years finishing top 4, 2nd, getting record points totals, breaking goal scoring records, and Reina winning golden gloves awards, winning the CL, getting to another final, winning the FA cup etc etc. He got lucky over a period of seven years. Hodgson was deseperately unlucky because the players he inherited were rubbish. If the former Bristol City manager, who once got Inter Milan to finish 5th, and who four years ago was coaching in the UAE, can't get the best out of tem it proves they are rubbish. Now we are witnessing Kenny Dalglish come in and be unbelievably lucky in spite of reverting to tactics much closer to Benitez's. So far he has had four very lucky wins and clean sheets.

Benitez is a terrible manager, as his record at Valencia shows. He's also clearly very difficult to get along with as this interviewer clearly found him cold and distant and didn't enjoy his time with him one little bit.

(Credit: lvpl78 on BBC Sport Website)

Pretty sad when you have to use another posters comments to make a point for you. I could go through that entire post and tear it apart but I honestly cant be bothered. Anyway I will pick out one point he chose to make use of and that is of Yossi Benayoun, what he fails to mention in his sarcastic yet positive spin on Benitez is the tesitmony of the very same player, who said the following about Benitez:

"I made up my mind to leave a long time ago because of Benitez.' 'He never treated me with respect. If I played well, I never felt he gave me any credit." "He tried to destroy my confidence." "I felt he was waiting for me to make a mistake so he could use it against me."

I always wondered what Benitez was writing in that little notebook of his, and my theory for years was that he was writing down mistakes that each player made so he could use it in the future as justification for whatever reason he wanted. Benayoun's own words support this theory very well and I'm sure this is exactly what he was doing for players like Benayoun.

He said a lot more than this and I've no reason to believe that Benayoun is lying about anything he said, I'm sure Benitez acted just like that. The comments are pretty damning and shed a little light into what Benitez was really like behind closed doors. I'm sure he was a nightmare to play for, pretty draining to play your heart out, score a goal, look over to the manager's area and see Benitez with the same miserable face that wouldn't change no matter what you did on the pitch, and to then know he would drop you the next game, and that there was nothing you could do to please him.

Thank god Benitez is a distant memory and we have the king back. It's pretty obvious all the players love playing for him. Better manager, better man-manager, and a person who knows how to treat his players.

I thought that sentence was so good, I just had to highlight it again. While I don't know you personally, that there sentence tells me SO much about you.


P.S. 'Providing I'm not breaking any forum rules', I will post what I want, whenever I want & to whom ever I want, regardless of how sad your ego tells you it is.