MARK LAWRENSON: Owners’ doubts on Benitez could unsettle star players

Jan 15 2008 By Mark Lawrenson

SO managers aren’t managers any more – they’re ‘insurance policies’.What rubbish. Or garbage, as Tom Hicks and George Gillett would say.

Yesterday’s admission that they met Jurgen Klinsmann just gives further credence to the theory that the right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing.

But what both hands appear to be doing is nothing but push Rafa away – and that’s barmy.

For a start, the crowd will go bananas about that, as they should already know if they paid any attention to what happened before the Porto game a few weeks back.

Then there’s the issue of having to pay him off, which is a bit of a problem what with money being so apparently tight at the moment.

And who do they reckon will take the job now anyway? Getting good managers is so difficult.

They certainly can’t have Klinsmann now he’s landed Bayern Munich (lucky escape for him, or what?) and even if Jose Mourinho did want it, he can’t manage a club in England until the summer anyway.

And you can probably forget Javier Mascherano signing as well as waving goodbye to Fernando Torres.

Benitez played a big part in luring him to Liverpool and has helped him settle but if he goes and then gets homesick, that’s it, he’ll be off.

And the way he’s playing you can’t really see there being much tumbleweed around the market when he’s on it.

So it’s complete madness if they think they need a change of manager at this stage of the season and – even though they now predictably insist Rafa has their backing – Hicks and Gillett are certainly going the right way about it.

But for all this public undermining I don’t think Benitez should go.

He needs to hang on, pick his strongest teams, win a trophy and make it 15-15. Stick the ball back in their court.

There’s no reason why he can’t carry on with the football side effectively. It’s not as if he’s ever had a great relationship with the owners anyway and they’re so distant from the whole operation that it shouldn’t affect his day-to-day working anyway.

If they wanted to interfere they’d have to come over a lot more often than when there’s a big name in town.

So Rafa needs to say: “Stuff you lot – I’m going to make sure we have a good second half of the season.”

I would love to see him do that because I’ve actually come down firmly on his side over the whole issue of their spat back in November.

Okay, he was wrong to go on a bit of a sulk – but he was dead right in the overall point.

That Hicks and Gillett didn’t understand the way transfers worked in Europe and that they needed to sit down to sort out how they were going to land their targets in the next window.

I don’t think that was out of order – in fact, I don’t think it would have been out of order if he’d said they don’t understand anything about football at all.

They certainly don’t seem to understand the history of Liverpool, no matter how much they insisted they did when they first took over.

However, it’s the future of it I’m worried about, because at the moment Liverpool just isn’t Liverpool.

Never mind all the stuff about revising stadium plans, selling on shares to DIC – even if they walk away with a profit and pass it all on to someone else, good luck to them I say.

But that wasn’t what they told everybody when they were in for the club this time last year.

And the trust between them and the supporters just diminishes even further when they come out and admit secret meetings with the likes of Klinsmann and they don’t seem to think that’s a problem.

Come on! How naive can you be?

If you really want to sound out another manager, just employ someone to make discreet enquiries.

You don’t even have to say which club you’re doing it on behalf of, just test the water to see what the potential candidates are.

If they were really worried about Benitez going off to Real Madrid then okay, nothing wrong with putting some feelers out.

But completely giving the game away like this and letting things leak out is just not how things are done at Anfield.

So the longer this goes on the more you worry about the Liverpool owners.

Their hearts just can’t be in it any more and this club can’t afford to be guided by people who have that attitude.

Mark Lawrenson was talking to NICK SMITH