Rafael Benitez

There was a time during Liverpool's magnificent failure to win the 2008-2009 league title that I was a jinx. I was no good to the team, no good at all, and if you ask anyone who was around me at the time they will tell you the same. Some of these people could not have given two shits about football, the title, or where it ended up - but they were genuinely stunned at the shadow I cast over Liverpool whenever I watched them, so I took one for the team and I simply stopped doing it.

So when, in the second half of that season that has now proved to be the fruitiest of false dawns, first Real and then United got so stylishly obliterated in the space of a week - eight goals in total, four of them at Old Trafford - I wasn't watching that live. Radio commentary has always been too hairy, so I had a website rundown and the odd drunken phone call to go by, and that my friends was it. Shame, you might say. And I agree, but at the time it was all I could see to do. I've seen all of those games since, and been enthralled, but in retrospect? Jinx or no, I missed out on some really, really good stuff.

Retrospectively, though... Ah, it is a shame. That Liverpool team, Rafa's team, in the final period of that season - just the season before last - when all the mistakes had been mostly toned down, and Gerrard and Torres were not just beginning to appreciate each other's game but actually seeming to fall in love with each other's game... they were a match for anyone in Europe, and certainly more than a match for the team that ended up with more points than them in England. So it goes. But I thought then, as I do now, that there, but with the grace of God, we could have gone.

If only:
One season - just one - without injuries to Steven Gerrard and Fernando Torres.
If only whatever the nebulous breakdown in whatever undeniable understanding that once existed between Xavi Alonso, that deep-lying midfield composer, and Benitez had not ever occurred.
If only Babel had somehow been coerced into fulfilment of potential.
If only Alberto Aquilani, Alonso's eventual replacement, had not been dishonestly sold as a player who would be team-fit in a "few months".
And so on.

There are many things that make or break managerial reigns, those that cannot fall back on an obscenely infinite supply of sudden cash anyway, and most of those things have to do with luck. I can still remember the Mark Robins goal that kept Alex Ferguson in his job in 1989, as I am sure he does - I imagine that despite all of the trophies he has accumulated since, when he closes his eyes he can recall that goal as perfectly as any other. Rafael Benitez will not leave a mark as similar to Fergie's in the English game, nor even will he have, it transpires, come close. But with Liverpool's supporters... oh, he leaves a lot. He means a lot. Istanbul, of course we've heard all about that. But there are other things to do with the man, this most appealing - to me anyway - of stark contrasts to Mourinho.

His humour, for instance. Not for Rafael Benitez were these easy pickings... To him, each press conference must have been full of tumbleweeds and bemused faces, these hacks all reared on 'Appy 'Arry soundbites. But, my friends. His Ferguson-directed "facts" press conference - "infamous" now, according to some papers - was an amazing piss-take at the same time as being, like the man said, the "facts". The fact that it almost seemed to pave the way for an utterly shambolic run of form doesn't matter - it didn't at the time. The "Rafa's cracking up!" chants were sardonically turned on their head and delivered back to the home supporters at the Theatre of Dreams, anyway. With interest. And even though he never ever smiled down on the touchline, you know he was smiling then, somewhere. These people, Phils Thompson and Neal chief among them, professing now that that's when they new it was all going awry for Rafa's reign to Sky News, after the man has gone... well it's shameful huckstering, and a bit rich in Thompson's case certainly, coming as it is from a man who once managed, in Gerard Houllier's absence through a mid-season, near calamitous heart scare, to turn a free-scoring team of title favourites into top four hopefuls, at best, by the time of Houllier's recovery. And managed to completely ostracise one Robert Bernard Fowler to boot. Top job.

A close friend of mine - a gooner - and I had a drunken conversation about Rafa a few months ago, during which he listed all the reasons he hated him. I accepted it as best I could. The next morning he woke me up to tell me about, and get me to watch, the press conference Benitez had given after beating Sam Allardyce's Blackburn, who had been fairly lucky to not be disqualified outright from the league, the world in general, for their antics in that particular game. Allardyce - a man whose dislike for Benitez is matched only by his admiration for Alex Ferguson - had been complaining of Liverpool's apparently negative tactics in the match. Benitez in the press conference very soberly said that he had taken these comments on board, and had heard that Pep Guardiola had been looking into adapting the Blackburn style of play. You know, to make Barca more entertaining. Anyway, the first words out of my gooner friend's mouth upon crashing my door open and waking me up, were: "I take it all back about Rafa - he's sarcastic as fuck!" And, for once, that silly gooner had seen the light.