interesting insights and
recounting wat happened before tis:-
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For once, a contract announcement with impeccable timing.
Liverpool were in the thick of their Premier League title race and
preparing for the first of what were to be three encounters with
Everton in January when Rafael Benitez announced, in no uncertain
terms, that he was dissatisfied with the control he was being
afforded within the terms of the proposed new deal which had just
hit his desk. Last night's announcement of a new five-year contract
comes ahead of Liverpool's renewed, if belated, assault on the
title.
Though it also arrives against the backdrop of two of the most
famous wins in the club's history – eight goals within the space of
100 hours against Real Madrid and Manchester United – the
£4m-a-year deal cannot be seen as a direct reward for that. Benitez
has been lobbying for weeks behind the scenes for an overriding
aim: greater control over whom Liverpool pursue in the transfer
market, with his agent Manuel Garcia Quilon rejecting half a dozen
contract drafts. The word from both Liverpool's owners, Tom Hicks
and George Gillett, was that the "checks and balances" of a
corporate structure in which a chief executive operates between
them and the manager must be in place at Liverpool, just like
Manchester United. But Benitez, determined to avoid a repeat of the
situation in July, when his protracted pursuit of Gareth Barry, the
Aston Villa midfield player, ended in humiliation with the board
vetoing an £18m deal, has gradually moved towards a position in
which he feels comfortable.
The tortuous road towards this resolution stretches back to last
April when Tom Hicks, seemingly trying to improve his own
credibility in a particularly rancorous phase of his relationship
with co-owner George Gillett, announced a one-year extension to a
contract which expires next summer. It was hardly a ringing
endorsement and on 7 November the Americans, aware that the
prospect of Benitez's departure would damage their attempts to sell
Liverpool, came up with a more positive announcement that contract
discussions were starting in earnest. That public declaration
created immediate time pressure and Benitez fanned the flames,
declaring immediately that he wanted the whole business resolved by
the end of that month.
Hicks and Gillett are all too familiar with Benitez's demands to
deal directly with them. When they told the Spaniard in October
2007 to stop demanding more money and work through chief executive
Rick Parry it presaged one of the longest sulks in Premier League
history. Benitez waged the same kind of battle with the owners of
the Extremadura club he managed in Spain in the late 1990s,
insisting their facilities were inadequate, and the way he
ridiculed the players Valencia bought him during a battle for
transfer policy autonomy mirrors the recent one at Anfield. That
spat brought us his now legendary line: "I asked for a table and
they brought me a lampshade."
Parry has represented the prime obstacle to Benitez's ambitions.
The Spaniard has taken issue with the way Liverpool's outgoing
chief executive operates and with the lack of urgency, as he sees
it, with which players are pursued. But Benitez has often been a
source of supreme frustration. A favoured strategy has been to
insist his board sign a player or lose them to Manchester United.
Only last week, Benitez described dragging Parry to a fax machine
to secure Lucas Leiva's services, before United might pounce. He
made precisely the same warning about Italian defender Andrea
Dossena, though to suggest United were interested seems far
fetched.
As the Americans gradually ceded greater control towards the
manager in the various drafts of the contract, Parry told Hicks and
Gillett, a few days before Liverpool travelled to play Real Madrid
in the Bernabeu last month, that he would be leaving at the end of
the season. That appears to have been a critical staging post in
the journey towards persuading Benitez that he will be operating in
a different realm in the future.
So is this the end of the interminable power struggles at
Anfield? Unlikely, where Benitez is concerned. Hicks and Gillett
remain convinced that control of the manager's autonomy is
necessary and in the words of one senior executive at Anfield,
there is no way they will say to Benitez at the end of a season:
"Here's £20m, we'll see you in September." The assiduous search for
a replacement for Parry – commercial director Ian Ayres is a
contender and former FA chief executive Brian Barwick was at the
Liverpool/Real Madrid game – suggests the Americans are not looking
for patsy. A strong chief executive means Benitez would have as
much of a battle on his hands as ever.
But for now at least, the manager's future is secured and
Liverpool have even more potential to achieve the near impossible
and topple Manchester United, the champions elect.