Liverpool owners will make sure it ends in tears for Rafael Benitez

From Times Online

January 14, 2008

Oliver Kay

There was a widespread sense of disbelief among Liverpool’s supporters earlier this season when The Times and other newspapers began to report that the club’s American owners were plotting to replace Rafael Benitez. Reporters have been accused of working with an anti-Liverpool agenda, of being hell-bent on driving Benitez out of the club, of inventing controversies when there was nothing but harmony behind the scenes at Anfield.

Let us get one thing straight here: The Times does not have it in for Benitez; Liverpool’s owners do. To go behind his back to talk to Jurgen Klinsmann, as Tom Hicks admitted today that they had, might have been within their rights as owners of the club, but in the eyes of the supporters, it is a betrayal. And to make this information public two months on, just when his position appeared to have stabilised in the short term, is either lunacy on Hicks’s part or a deliberate attempt to undermine an increasingly beleaguered manager.

Hicks defended the move by saying that he and George Gillett Jnr “attempted to negotiate an insurance policy, to have [Klinsmann] become manager if Rafa left for Real Madrid or other clubs that were rumoured in the UK press.” This might all sound very smart to Hicks, but it is an insult to a manager whose affection for and commitment to Liverpool runs far deeper than that of the owners.

Benitez has been far from blameless in this episode, but the only he was ever going to leave the club this season – as seemed possible in November, when his relationship with the owners was at rock bottom – was if he was kicked out. Real Madrid was not an option for him, partly because he and his family are settled on Merseyside and partly because of the job Bernd Schuster is doing at the Spanish club.

Related Links

• Liverpool approached Klinsmann to be manager

• Klinsmann takes over at Bayern

If Hicks knew anything about European “soccer”, he would have been aware of that. There was interest from Bayern Munich – interest that Benitez instantly discouraged – but that was about a job starting next summer. A job that, as it happens, Klinsmann has taken.

There is another issue here: what is the big attraction with Klinsmann? Why, like Roman Abramovich at Chelsea a year ago, were Hicks and Gillett seduced by the idea of replacing a European Cup-winning coach with a man with such little obvious coaching pedigree. Yes, Klinsmann took Germany to the World Cup semi-finals in 2006, but it was on home soil, riding a wave of patriotic fervour to overcome the collective might of Costa Rica, Poland, Ecuador and a toothless Sweden before a lucky penalty shoot-out victory (aren’t they all?) over an Argentina side that self-destructed in the quarter-final. They then lost to Italy in the semi-final. The view within the game at the time was that the real work had been done by his assistant, Joachim Low, who has proved his worth since taking the job full-time.

The similarities with the Chelsea situation a year ago are numerous: the Klinsmann link surfacing after an owner (or two in Liverpool’s case) had his ego bruised by a manager who dared to challenge his authority. Jose Mourinho was effectively left a lame duck after his fall-out with Roman Abramovich a year ago. He lasted until the end of the season and then, to everybody’s surprise, held on until mid-September, but it all ended in Iberian tears – just as it will with Benitez at Anfield.

What’s that you say? That everything is fine now that Foster Gillett is there to act as a go-between? That Hicks made clear in remarks to the Liverpool Echo that Benitez “has our support”? Do you really believe that? Do you see it as a genuine vote of confidence? Do you really believe that the media are the ones trying to drive Benitez out of Liverpool? Or has the penny dropped that Benitez will be out of Anfield by the end of the season? Unless, of course, Hicks and Gillett, fearing a revolt on the terraces, sling their hook first.