Liverpool legend Ronnie Whelan lays into Rafa Benitez

Feb 18 2008

Former Liverpool midfielder Ronnie Whelan has blamed Rafael Benitez for the club’s recent poor form which culminated in their FA Cup exit to Barnsley.

The Reds were knocked out of the competition at the fifth round after they suffered an embarrassing 2-1 home defeat to Simon Davey’s Coca-Cola Championship side at the weekend.

And Whelan insisted the recent demise is the fault of the Liverpool manager and not the club’s American owners George Gillett and Tom Hicks who have taken a lot of the flak from supporters.

“To get beaten by Barnsley - I don’t know what’s going on. The performances on the pitch have been absolutely abysmal,” Whelan told RTE radio.

“Okay, you say ’now and again there’s a cup upset, it’s a one-off’ but it’s not really a one-off at the moment with Liverpool.

“They struggled against a team six leagues below in the round before, who no-one had ever heard of. They struggled against Luton, they’re having a lot of struggles at the moment.

“They have no chance of winning the league. And I think the manager is under a lot of pressure now.”

Whelan continued: “He spent an awful lot of money on an awful lot of players and they haven’t been very good signings.

“And people are shouting, ’get rid of the Americans’. The Americans have backed the manager to the hilt. They gave him 46 million or something to spend in the summer.

“He’s spent nearly 140/150 million and he still cannot get close to Manchester United, Arsenal or Chelsea.

“The players he signed I don’t think are good enough. After all the money he’s spent they’re still further behind than they were last year.

“So then you have to start looking at the manager who is buying the players and picking the team.”

Whelan, who was capped 53 times for Republic of Ireland, was though positive over the appointment of Giovanni Trapattoni as the country’s new manager.

“When Steve Staunton left the job people said what do we need? I said we need a very, very experienced manager,” Whelan added.

“And I said Terry Venables because he was of that ilk. But Trapattoni for me is a very good choice, a very experienced manager.

“People say he’s not the most likeable person in the world, but then what good manager is a likeable person?

“There’s a lot of young lads in this squad now and hopefully he can steer them in the right direction of how to play international football and hopefully we can start qualifying for major championships again.”