Sunday, August 16, 2009

Rafael Benítez Plans To End Liverpool's Long Wait For The Title By Going For Broke


A manager must build expectations but it is revealing how Rafael Benítez already speaks of "managing" them. The financial sands have shifted under the Spaniard this summer and yet, after five years of gradual and occasionally fraught progress, he knows the anticipation is that his building work is nearing completion at Liverpool. He cannot promise the club's first league title since 1990 but nor does he deny, to use a favoured word, its possibility.

Title predictions are peculiar this year given the leading contenders are judged not on how they have improved but how much they have weakened. On this score Benítez encourages Anfield's optimists with the assessment that his Liverpool squad is equal to that which finished second and four points behind Manchester United last season. And this despite the loss of Xabi Alonso to Real Madrid and the influential midfielder's replacement, Alberto Aquilani, being at least a month away from his Premier League debut due to ankle surgery.

In Aquilani, Benítez believes he has located one of the keys to improvement. The final step has proven the hardest for every Anfield manager since Kenny Dalglish left the club in 1991, and Benítez is confident the £20m Italian can remedy the seven home draws that, along with repeated hamstring injuries to Fernando Torres, cost Liverpool the title last season. More adventurous than Alonso, the former Roma playmaker has been designated a role in support of Steven Gerrard this term, leaving Javier Mascherano as the lone holding midfielder at home, with his goals and swift, incisive passing removing the handbrake from those teams intent on parking the bus. That is the theory at least.

Liverpool will stretch those same rigid defences to a greater degree with Glen Johnson raiding from right-back. Benítez has never been sold on the value of an out-and-out winger but the England international, while needing to improve defensively, can provide the width Liverpool have sorely lacked on occasion. So far, so encouraging for a team that added a swagger to its consistency as last season progressed and fielded Gerrard with Torres only 14 times in the league due to injury.

"If you analyse the two players we have signed, they are players with quality," Benítez insists. "We needed a little bit more quality at right-back and we got Johnson. Trying to find that extra quality is difficult. [Andriy] Voronin has come back and has done really well in pre-season and did really well at Hertha Berlin last season. Yes, we have lost something with Alonso, but we couldn't stop him from going. We have tried to manage that loss and have brought someone in, Aquilani, who we feel can help us win the games that we were drawing at home last season. Aquilani, Voronin and Johnson are three players with game intelligence and quality going forward that can all help in that manner."

Hold on. Voronin? Benítez is looking to Voronin to help Liverpool erase 20 years of desperation in May next May? Here is where concerns over Liverpool's title credentials surface. This scepticism is not a criticism of Voronin directly. He did, after all, score 11 goals in 23 games on loan with Hertha last season and would have signed permanently had they qualified for the Champions League. But if the answer is Voronin, who scored five league goals for Liverpool before being shipped back to Germany, then the question is what happened to the £20m Benítez was promised on top of the money he raised through player sales this summer?

The Liverpool manager had David Silva of Valencia in mind as the calibre of player who could improve his team's penetration. Now he is reliant on the reinvention of the 30-year-old Ukrainian or the penny finally dropping with Ryan Babel. Benítez's budget has been revised and is understood to have had to incorporate the lucrative contracts awarded this summer to Gerrard and Torres, who put pen to paper on a £110,000-a-week, four-year deal with the option of a fifth year yesterday. They are worth every penny, but strength in depth could prove a fundamental weakness at Anfield unless funds are forthcoming in the final weeks of the transfer window.

Benítez has resisted entering into another divisive confrontation with the Liverpool owners Tom Hicks and George Gillett over finance, but it is no surprise he enters the new campaign with characteristic caution. "I don't feel any extra pressure because we haven't won anything for three seasons. We have to manage the expectations," he said ahead of tomorrow's opener at Tottenham Hotspur.

"We know the situation. If you talk about the title, everybody is saying we have to win it [the title] this season. But I don't think so. We have to be realistic, we want to be in the top four and to be contenders. I was asked the same questions this time last year and I said we wanted to be in a good position come January. We were, and we stayed in a good position all the way through to the end of the season. We have to have that same approach this season, taking it one game at a time and seeing where we are at the end of each week. People will say I'm always saying the same thing, but it has to be like this."

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