Hooked by whole new ball game

May 21 2007 Nick Smith, Liverpool Daily Post

IN the first of a two-part special, Rafael Benitez’s biographer Paco Lloret tells Nick Smith the secrets of his friend’s success

“I thought he was crazy because nobody knew him. This was around 1992-94 and the best coach in Spain at that time was Johann Cruyff, a real legend.

“But although Rafa wasn’t famous he had his ideas for the future, real plans. He had them in his head but because nobody knew him nobody thought he would be able to do it.

“My friend was a Valencia fan like me and told me that if he was our coach Valencia would win the Champions League.

“I said to him ‘you are crazy.’ I suppose he was wrong with that prediction but what happened for Rafa in the end was even better, winning it with Liverpool. But just a few years after my first contact with Rafa, there he was as Valencia coach and that was a big surprise.

“I still thought all I’d heard about what he could do for us was a mad idea but just eight years after I first heard about him there he was – the champion coach in Spain.”

Being influenced by basketball and chess perhaps sums up the punishingly methodical ethos and attention to detail of Benitez that few coaches can match.

It was so far ahead of its time that Spaniards failed to switch on to it and were barely converted by Benitez’s early failures in first-team management at Real Valladolid and Osasuna.

Although Benitez’s obsessive control over his players soon came to the fore with promotions at Extremadura and Tenerife, it was hard for him to shake off the scepticism some still attach to him even now.

The theory, which would go on to blight his first few months with Valencia, was that his approach hardly made for edge- of-the-seat stuff and the players were programmed to do their jobs with robotic monotony.

Lloret, however, explodes the myth. The reality is that because the players were so well-drilled by Benitez their understanding of the game was better and this in turn made it more enjoyable to play under him.

Although it has to be pointed out that, as you’d expect working under such a perfectionist, training was no picnic.