Snobbish attitude to domestic cup duties costs Liverpool
dear
Rafael Benítez pays a price for treating the Carling Cup with
disdain and prospective owners will not be happy
If Rafael Benítez needed confirmation of the benefits that winning
the Carling Cup can bestow, he had only to look up into the
directors' box at Anfield last night. There, his face burnished by
a recent dose of Dubai sun, sat Steve McClaren, whose capture of
the trophy at Middlesbrough went a long way towards securing him
the England manager's job.
In Benítez's position last night McClaren would almost certainly
have fielded his strongest possible side as he tried to exorcise
pyschological damage inflicted by the weekend's FA Cup defeat at
the hands of the same opponents. But the Liverpool manager's
Spanish roots dictate that he remains a bit of a snob about
domestic cup competitions. How else to explain why he gambled on
causing palpitations among the Maktoum family in Dubai by fielding
several second-stringers against a similarly weakened Arsenal
side?
Afterwards his words remained as defiant as his decision to keep
Peter Crouch on the bench, but his expression told another story.
Regret seemed written all over his face when he admitted: "I say
sorry to our supporters."
A proud man, Benítez does not find apology easy and continued in
uncomfortable sentences: "It was a bad game and we will try and
forget it as soon as possible. We worked really hard, but it's very
difficult to explain. The other team has quality and were keeping
the ball better - and each attempt they had at a goal they
scored."
It is surely too much for Liverpool's manager to hope that the
club's soon-to-be owners were not watching in horror in the United
Arab Emirates. The Maktoums will be mystified as to why Benítez
spurned the chance of lifting a piece of silverware, particularly
when Liverpool are already way out of title contention, eliminated
from the FA Cup and facing a daunting Champions League tie with
Barcelona next month. Surely this was the last occasion when key
players needed resting and rotating.
He may have won the Uefa Cup with Valencia but Benítez has
apparently made the mistake of being too sniffy about a competition
capable of conferring invaluable boardroom and terrace "cred" on
those who choreograph its winners. Not to mention virtual immunity
from the sack; it would, after all, take a harsh chairman to
dismiss a trophy winner.
Yet Benítez treated the Carling Cup with the sort of disdain he
might once have reserved for the plain girl who kept demanding his
attention at a teenage disco. Now, in the second week of January,
he is the one in danger of being left looking like a wallflower,
the boy left with no girl to walk home as Liverpool's season
dissolves in dashed expectations.
How he must wish he could swap places with Arsène Wenger. "Our
future is very promising," agreed Arsenal's manager, who admitted
he was surprised that Benítez had not started with a "normal" team.
"Our young players have shown they have mental strength as well as
talent."
When he eventually reports to the club's new owners, Benítez may
blame the English academy system and its failings for Liverpool's
lack of strength in depth. Indeed, he apparently has so little
faith in the homegrown players coming through at Anfield that only
three youngsters in his starting XI were produced locally.
Although no worse than the lightweight foreign imports playing
alongside them, Danny Guthrie, Lee Peltier and Stephen Warnock
failed to impress on a night which cried out for such second-
stringers to strut their stuff - not to mention impress watching
managers seeking to work the loan system during this month's
transfer window. Glenn Roeder, for instance, had presumably made
the long drive from Newcastle to identify such a potential
acquistion.
Roeder may have had his eye on Warnock, Liverpool's left-back. If
so, it might explain why he looked rather pale as he left his seat
at the interval, by which time Warnock's part in Liverpool's
collapse possibly had Newcastle's manager wondering if even Albert
Luque might be a better alternative to Celestine Babayaro.
Indeed, Liverpool's defensive positioning was so bad that even
Jérémie Aliadière looked a world beater. As Wenger put it: "I
always thought we had a chance to win - but I didn't think we'd
score six goals."
