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Search: ' Rafa Benitez'

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Rafael Benítez’s transfer frustrations hinder Newcastle’s Premier League return

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It’s been a slow summer at St James’ Park but Newcastle are well placed to have a solid season, while opening-day opponents Spurs look to push on

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There’s always last year ~ Premier League 2015-16

Leicester 17th, Chelsea champions and Watford relegation – what WSC contributors got right and wrong about the previous season

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12 August ~ “The arrival of manager Claudio Ranieri doesn’t seem to be the most reassuring,” wrote Leicester City fan Simon Tyers in WSC’s 2015-16 season guide last summer. “I’m still confident we’ll survive… but probably with someone else at the helm.” He wasn’t alone, with the Foxes averaging 17th position among the rest of the Premier League contributors’ forecasts.

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The Gaffer

323 WarnockThe trials and tribulations of a football manager
by Neil Warnock
Headline £16.99
Reviewed by Roger Titford
From WSC 323 January 2014

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Outside Yorkshire people would call Neil Warnock’s bluntness “refreshing”, but I had enough relatives from the county to realise he is just talking normally, apart from the strange absence of any swearing. Warnock takes us well beyond the angry and abusive figure he was on the touchline to give perhaps one of the last accounts of being a manager from an English, old-school perspective, stretching across all the divisions.

He is prepared to name those he does not like, bears a few grievances (and why not after 33 years as a manager) and offers a few telling insights into the managerial mind. Some clubs have apparently switched the position of the home and away dug-outs, the better to berate the linesman running the right wing – no stone left unturned in the modern game.

Warnock has aired his views by means of a weekly column in the Independent (which I have not read and therefore cannot tell how much, if any, is rehashed). For The Gaffer he has employed the Independent‘s Glenn Moore to bring some polish to his thoughts. The pleasing result is an unusual structure, more reminiscent of fiction than biography. At times it reads like the musings of an after-dinner speaker reviewing his whole career through the prism of his current and recent jobs. The benefit to the well-informed fan is that you do not know what is going to come next, as you would with a more chronological approach.

The disadvantage, of course, is the reader might not get what they expect. I would have preferred more on his time at Bramall Lane. For me, and for the football world in general I think, this was the apotheosis of Warnock: ardent supporter turned successful manager and tragically undone in 2007 by managerial “friends” Alex Ferguson and Rafa Benítez, who picked weakened teams against Sheffield United’s relegation rivals, and the dodgy Carlos Tévez deal.

Instead the focus is very much on later years with unstinting praise for Simon Jordan, once chairman of Crystal Palace, and the club’s fans. This is followed by a detailed account of life at Loftus Road under the auspices of various uncontrollable international business moguls and in charge of difficult talents such as Joey Barton and Adel Taarabt. The job did not get any easier with the Anton Ferdinand and John Terry affair, which gets a close and dispassionate examination.

Warnock conveys a very strong sense of the manager’s role being invaded and undermined by non-football issues inconceivable when he started at Scarborough and Notts County, hence the sub-title of this book. Nevertheless he remains hooked on the thrills and changing fortunes of football management. After QPR he took on Leeds, Ken Bates and a foreign takeover and the final few pages read more like another job application than a farewell to a boisterous 33 years of hurt.

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GoodFella

321 BellamyMy autobiography
by Craig Bellamy
Sport Media, £18.99
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 320 October 2013

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As his old boss Mark Hughes points out in the foreword to GoodFella, Craig Bellamy has a lot of strengths but diplomacy isn’t one of them. It’s an approach that’s landed him in all shades of bother throughout a nomadic career, from the “nutter with a putter” spat with John Arne Riise to brawling with bouncers outside nightclubs. It’s all laid bare here, though the real selling point of this highly engrossing memoir (written with the Daily Mirror‘s Oliver Holt as guide) is Bellamy’s frank and often painful honesty. Especially when it comes to himself.

It’s unflattering stuff. Here is a man utterly consumed by football, driven by insecurity and a will to succeed that frequently veers into self-admonishment. Such intensity, he says, turned him into “the human snarl”. Dogged by repeated knee injuries, he’s sulky and uncommunicative, especially with his wife and kids. He admits to infidelities. And during his final days at Newcastle he becomes obnoxious and arrogant.

The watershed moment comes in November 2011, with the suicide of his idol and close friend Gary Speed. Cue a rigorous stock-take of his life and destructive personality, followed by therapy with British Olympic psychiatrist Steve Peters. Bellamy finally allows himself to let go of his rage. By then it’s too late to save his marriage but what emerges is a more forgiving, open and ultimately contented character.

Not that Bellamy was ever a footballing pariah – there are plenty of former team-mates who vouch for him both as a human being and professional – but GoodFella doesn’t hold back when it comes to those he disliked. Graham Poll comes across as a self-serving “celebrity ref”, starstruck by David Beckham and Patrick Vieira. And while Bellamy cites Bobby Robson as the best manager he ever worked with, his successor Graeme Souness is the iron fist who came in looking for a fight.

Both Rafa Benítez and Roberto Mancini are portrayed as joyless control freaks, the former an “unsmiling headmaster” with no room for spontaneity or sentiment, an attention-seeking dictator. City’s Brazilian folly Robinho is appallingly lazy, both in training and on the pitch, and a spoilt man-child when Bellamy confronts him about it.

Perhaps the most damning verdict is reserved for one-time Newcastle strike partner Alan Shearer, who is seen as a self-absorbed egotist with a yellow streak. Bellamy gleefully recounts the England man’s reluctance to leave the pitch after a game against Manchester United, knowing that Roy Keane (who’d been sent off for a Shearer-related fracas) was waiting in the tunnel. And after hearing he’d supposedly dissed him to others after moving on to Celtic, Bellamy texts Shearer directly after Newcastle’s lame FA Cup semi-final defeat in 2005: “Fucking typical of you. Looking at everyone else yet again. You need to look at yourself instead.” Shearer threatens to knock him out next time he’s in Newcastle.

All of this serves as a thoroughly refreshing antidote to the usual blandness that makes for football biographies. But GoodFella is far more substantial than just a series of delicious anecdotes. It feels like a rich confession from one of the game’s most misconstrued personalities.

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Champions League Dreams

312 Benitezby Rafa Benítez
Headline, £20
Reviewed by Rob Hughes
From WSC 312 February 2013

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While it’s still too early to judge Brendan Rodgers, the consensus on Liverpool’s post-war managers is pretty much in. Shankly and Paisley? Daft question. Dalglish? Still a legend, despite last season. Evans and Houllier? Both missed their chance and overstayed their time. Hodgson? Oh come on.

But no Liverpool chief has polarised opinion like Rafa Benítez. To some he remains the tactical giant who outmanoeuvred far superior teams on the way to Champions League nirvana in 2005 and whose plans for reasserting Liverpool’s dominance at home were only undone by the financial misdeeds of a pair of mad American owners. To others he’s the bloke who got lucky, made more disastrous transfer dealings than good ones, took us down into the Europa League and promptly buggered off to Milan with a £6 million pay-off.

Champions League Dreams is unlikely to make either camp scamper over to the other side. Aided by Telegraph writer Rory Smith, Benítez’s prose is often as clinical and perfunctory as his press conferences while he journeys through his six European campaigns at the club. It’s a smart narrative move. Ignoring his underwhelming achievements in the Premier League – only coming close in 2008-09 and that after an embarrassing post-Christmas collapse and the Robbie Keane fiasco – this book amounts to a Greatest Hits of Rafa’s time at Liverpool.

One thing it does shore up is his obsession for detail. Benítez happily reveals the extent of his DVD resource library, one that lined the walls at Melwood, filled the basement at home and even stuffed up the attic of his parents’ house in Madrid. Those DVDs and accompanying notes were filled with games, players and coaching sessions, all neatly categorised, numbered and instantly accessible through a database, what he describes as “not just a record of all the games I had managed and training sessions I had overseen in my career, but an extensive library of football around the world”. It was a system he applied to educate players about the opposition and how to improve.

Some of his written detail is enlightening, not least when explaining how Liverpool managed to outsmart Barcelona in 2007, pinching the win at the Nou Camp then, with a first 45 minutes of “possibly the best half of football, tactically, I saw in my time at Liverpool”, closing out the tie. Occasionally some of the incidental detail is precious. Steven Gerrard, for instance, catching a lift home from a passing milk float when unable to flag a taxi after celebrating the semi-final win against Chelsea that season.

The baffling sale of Xabi Alonso is dealt with, though hardly satisfactorily, with Benítez claiming he was backed into a corner by financial necessity and UEFA’s newly imposed overseas player ratios. While both hold a degree of truth, at no point does he concede that it was a colossal mistake or show any awareness of the huge demotivating effect Alonso’s departure had on the likes of Gerrard, Javier Mascherano 
and Fernando Torres.

If it’s tactical insight you’re after, this book might suit you fine. But those hoping to unlock the secrets and impulses of this complex individual will be little the wiser.

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