Benitez unsure over Steven Gerrard's England role

Sep 24 2007 By Chris Beesley, Liverpool Daily Post

LIVERPOOL manager Rafael Benitez believes Steven Gerrard’s performances for his club over the past week could have been affected by starting both England’s recent European Championship qualifiers.

Despite coming closest to breaking the deadlock in a goalless draw against Birmingham at Anfield on Saturday when he had a shot cleared off the line, Gerrard has struggled to reach his own high standards in the last three games since the international break and has been unable to exert his normal influence over matches.

Gerrard, who suffered a broken toe earlier in the season, played 71 minutes against Israel before going off with cramp and then completed a full 90 minutes against Russia.

Benitez said: “It could be that playing twice for England has had an impact.

“They (the England staff) knew (what I felt about Gerrard playing in both games) but in this situation everyone was talking about how important this situation was for England.

“His national team is England but it is clear that these players cannot play every game for 90 minutes.

“Gerrard was not 100% physically fresh, I don’t mean fit but fresh. In these kind of games you need to keep the tempo really high and if you play too many games in a row for 90 minutes, especially if you are not fit then normally you have problems.”

Eyebrows were raised over Benitez’s decision to leave Fernando Torres on the

bench for the first hour against Birmingham but the Spaniard believes that he had able alternatives in Andriy Voronin and Dirk Kuyt.

He said: “I remember when I did not select Gerrard among my starters at Portsmouth but like I have said 100 times, you see your players and you know if they are tired or not and you need to decide these things before the game.

“Today people have asked about Torres but with Voronin and Kuyt we have the space and can do good movements.

“Today was a difficult game to play because Birmingham were deep, narrow and compact and it was not easy to find the spaces. You must be clever and analyse the game properly and play in a different way. You have to think how you will find the spaces.

“Between the lines, Voronin clearly has very good movement and has ability.

“To talk about using one striker or the other one is easy after the match, whether we should have gone with Peter Crouch or Torres.”

Benitez added: “We know that more teams will try and play this way at Anfield than come at us but in the first half we had a lot of different movements trying to beat them but we couldn’t.

“We can always go to the Plan C which is having the striker in the air which we did with Crouch but I don’t like to use that too much, the Plan B was to sustain the attack.

“For me the only thing was that in the last 20 minutes we didn’t regain the second balls and we gave them chances of getting forward.”

Benitez is expected to ring the changes for tomorrow night’s trip to the Madejski Stadium for a Carling Cup third round tie but he admits that whoever plays for Liverpool, his team are going to have to regain their scoring touch.

He said: “The last week has taught me that we need to be more precise in front of goal.

“To have a draw at Portsmouth after an international break is not bad if you see how the other team play. To have a draw away in Portugal against Porto in the first game of the Champions League is not bad. Today, okay we have lost two points that is clear.

“You need to win these kind of games. For me, if you do not create any chances or don’t control the game then you can say it’s a problem. But we did that so you need to analyse why we cannot score the first goal.”