Rafa Benitez

[Happy Face 29]

A Rafa blog I did for the Chronicle has gone up too.

Most of the 2745 days supporting Newcastle United between the departure of Kevin Keegan and arrival of Rafa Benitez were a hopeless existence. We knew what Mike Ashley was about and he never surprised us. There were the odd moments where a manager appointed only for his grateful obedience to the owner might have overachieved or where a player might show some individual ability, but any enthusiasm this might have generated within the fanbase could never last because you always knew there wasn’t anyone at the club looking to build anything great.

 

At no point between those two managers have we ever felt like a club where everyone pulled together in the same direction. We came closest in the Championship. In 2009/10 there was no interference from the board – it was official policy that they would not make any statements and nothing was done to further antagonise fans and switch their attention from supporting the team to protesting the owner.

 

Considering this, it was unsurprising that the Championship was won at a canter. Our club is capable of anything if everyone involved has the ambition to pull it off. There isn’t another in the country more passionately supported, and you can count on one hand other clubs that are able to generate more resources to be re-invested if the entire city has been galvanized.

 

Kevin Keegan got this. It’s what inspired him to come back to football and to manage our club for the first time, despite the immediate threat of the club dropping into the third tier. He knew that the sky was the limit. Going into the pivotal last game against Leicester, even while fighting relegation he said: “We need a result, but we’ll get it, survive and take-off”. And he proved that true, taking us all the way to a Premier League title challenge.

 

Even though Benitez has been unable to win his own relegation battle at Newcastle, he is cut from the same cloth as Keegan – but with more experience and silverware. Karl Darlow said in an interview recently that Benitez “had no reason to come really”. I think he’s wrong. I don’t think he understands this club the way Keegan, Benitez and the fans do.

 

Mike Ashley’s reign has done nothing to show Darlow why he’s wrong, in fairness. You can’t blame him for thinking like that – he was only two when first Keegan arrived. But Benitez knows that our one-club city with a stadium among the five biggest in the league and a fanbase that will fill it every week with little encouragementis something he’d struggle to find elsewhere in his preferred base of England.

 

Coming to Newcastle shouldn’t be beneath any top manager. The only thing that has made it so for the past eight years has been Mike Ashley. The protests that have dogged his ownership stem from his underselling of the club. While pundits have defended the fact that Pardew did a pretty good job under difficult circumstances, they disregard the fact that Newcastle fans know we’re capable of so much more and will always demand it.

 

Rafa has played the situation perfectly. He quickly announced after relegation that he would like to stay but that it was up to the club to deliver what he required. He holds all the cards and as soon as it looks like the club are going to renege on anything they’ve agreed then he will have the fans and the employment tribunal on his side if he’s forced to walk away from empty promises.

 

Ashley on the other hand is desperate. To be relegated once may be regarded as a misfortune – to be relegated twice looks like carelessness. Of course there are no guarantees of any lessons learned. If promotion is secured back to the Premier league, there is no reason that Ashley would not revert to type, mess Benitez about, underdeliver on autonomy and squad building and happily watch him walk away.

 

Bearing this in mind, despite my enthusiasm for the appointment and my delight that everyone at the club now seems to be singing from the same hymn sheet - “In Rafa we trust” - I won’t be rushing to buy the season ticket I gave up last season. I still fear the only thing keeping Ashley honest and supportive of Benitez will be the threat of an empty stadium. This threat will be pivotal to ensuring we aren’t sold short (again) when we return to the big money league.

 

Singles will do for me.

 

 

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/newcastle-united-fan-blog-rafa-11388759

[Dr Gloom 21915]

Great read

[David Kelly 1244]

92er

[Happy Face 29]

[ohhh_yeah 2964]

 

Rafa Benitez is one of football's most misunderstood figures even if he's a walking contradiction

 

Rafael Benitez stepped in front of the cameras and channelled his inner R Kelly. My heart is obviously telling me yes, this is a fantastic opportunity. But at the same time you have to use the brain.

When the famously icy and dispassionate Benitez put his decision in those terms that his staying at Newcastle United was a straight choice between his head and his heart few assumed the latter would win out. Plenty were probably surprised it had even entered into the equation.

Those who know him best, though, may be rather less shocked at how hes been swayed by the affection that's tumbled down on him from the St James Park terraces during his short stint on Tyneside. They may even find it tiresomely predictable. Because while Benitezs public image remains one of almost robotic detachment, the reality of the man is a shade more complex. In fact, as hard-hearted autocrats go, Benitez might just be the most gushingly emotional theres ever been.

 

This is, after all, a man who welled up in his departing press conference as Valencia coach as he spoke of one of the most difficult decisions Ive ever had to make, and whose unveiling at boyhood club Real Madrid was marked by his trying and failing to fight back the waterworks.

Back in 2011, an ovation from Liverpool fans as he attended the Hillsborough memorial service (his last act of manager a year earlier was to donate £96,000 to the families campaign fund) again had Rafa reaching for the handkerchief.

As public outpourings of emotion go, thats a fairly lengthy list by the standards of any adult male, not least once whose great undoing is supposedly a steadfast refusal to allow the world a glimpse behind his cold and calculating exterior. In fact, when it comes to Benitez theres one word above all other thats notable for its frequency.

 

Its emotional to finally be home, were his words upon being appointed at Madrid. Six months later, he spoke of how his impending trip to Valencias Mestalla will be emotional for me. After Aprils fightback at Anfield he described his return to the ground as both emotional and very emotional in the space of one interview. And he went one better in the wake of Newcastles tonking of Tottenham this month, recounting the fans non-stop serenading of him as very, very emotional.

 

Which isnt to say, of course, that the idea of Benitez the icy technocrat isnt also entirely true. Like most real-life personalities, he's a man of rather wild contradictions and it requires little digging to unearth an anecdote or three attesting to his more alienating qualities, many of which quickly pass from the startling to the hilarious.

Fernando Torres, for instance, recalls proudly informing his manager that his wife was expecting a child, only for the conversation to be quickly redirected towards some essential tweaks to the strikers near-post runs; one of Benitezs first conversations on the Istanbul pitch in the wake of the 2005 penalty shootout was to lecture Djibril Cisse on his misreading of Milans offside trap.

 

I was a bit taken aback by his attitude. It was like being in the presence of an unsmiling headmaster, wrote Craig Bellamy. Cold, almost inhumane, was the assessment of Jerzy Dudek, who went on to outline his own compulsion to punch Benitez in the face. Certainly, the notion that the Spaniard is perhaps not the most tender or paternal of managers has not sprung from nowhere.

 

Yet Benitez whose unquenchable thirst for total managerial control has led him to sign for such accommodating, hands-off employers as Roman Abramovich, Florentino Perez and Mike Ashley is a more layered character than the litany of snippets suggest. He may refuse to let emotions enter the fray when dealing with his players but thats not to say he isnt instinctively rocked by the sentimentality that runs through his line of work. Or, even, that he isnt drawn impulsively to the clubs where such wistfulness is at its very strongest.

Newcastle, as the cliché goes, is a club whose fanbase is more sentimental than most. And while that may be a lazy, hackneyed stereotype, its also true: when a once-grand club is starved of present-day success, nostalgia that most sentimental of feelings is what fans are left clinging to. Factor in the broader context of a community that Britains post-Thatcher economy has snatched away from its industrial roots, and you have nostalgia as a supremely powerful presence on Tyneside.

 

Benitez is already well versed in the idiosyncrasies of the grand old industrial cities of the north, and indeed of English footballs more misty-eyed breed of supporter and its no coincidence that on Merseyside he made up one half of Liverpools most affectionate fan/manager connection since the halcyon days of Dalglish. Benitezs bond with Kopites is unbreakable, wrote James Pearce in the Liverpool Echo last month. He will always be welcomed back with open arms.

Whatever doting kinship the Anfield crowd had with Benitez, though, was seemingly not shared by his players. To the voices of Bellamy and Dudek can be added Steven Gerrard. I don't think Benitez liked me as a person, he wrote. At press conferences he might call other players by their first name but I was always 'Gerrard'. It was the same in the dressing room.

And while it might be argued that Gerrard, despite his inward heartache, played his best football by some distance under Benitez, the same defence cant be mounted for all instances of the managers aloofness.

 

His irritation at Xabi Alonso missing an away trip to Inter after his girlfriend went into labour is often cited as the moment the blue touch paper was lit on the midfielders destabilising departure. Most recently, Benitezs unwillingness to perform the ego-inflation rituals necessary to keep the Real Madrid squad onside including his joyously stubborn refusal, under serial questioning, to label Cristiano Ronaldo the worlds best player is largely seen to have caused him to lose his dream job.

And yet this man of unmatchable frostiness is the same one who was parading around St James Park after the final game of the season, lapping up the approbation and blowing impassioned kisses to all corners of the grand old stadium.

The love I could feel from the fans was a big influence, Benitez said on Wednesday, of his decision to strap himself in at St James for the long haul, before revisiting a familiar theme.

Maybe its because Im older that Im more emotional now, he said. But after the last game it would have been very difficult to walk away. It was amazing. I want to repay the fans.

Benitez, footballs most famously unfeeling character, had thought long and hard and listened to his heart. As if he could have done anything else.

 

[Monkeys Fist 42413]

A Rafa blog I did for the Chronicle has gone up too.

 

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/newcastle-united-fan-blog-rafa-11388759

Subtle

[Happy Face 29]

Shame the chronicle style is one line paragraphs

[Renton 21612]

A Rafa blog I did for the Chronicle has gone up too.

 

http://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/newcastle-united-fan-blog-rafa-11388759

Too late now, but I have some suggestions.

 

4th paragraph from end, preface "Rafa" with "Until now,".

 

3rd paragraph from end, put a "Now" before "Ashley".

 

2nd paragraph from end, remove the opening word "Bearing", it's redundant.

 

Sorted.

[Happy Face 29]

It's a tribute to Dr fox, a Dr mind you, who said on Brasseye

 

"paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me. Now that is scientific fact, there's no real evidence for it but it is scientific fact."

[Monkeys Fist 42413]

I blame it on the Cake.

[Christmas Tree 4725]

I wonder what this could be?

 

[David Kelly 1244]

I wonder what this could be?

 

Only a 5% increase with extra games to go to.

[Gemmill 44853]

I wonder what this could be?

 

Clickbait for spackas like you.

[toonotl 2978]

Join the Rafalution, you grim cunt.

[Renton 21612]

Join the Rafalution, you grim cunt.

That's him telt.

[Gemmill 44853]

Join the Rafalution, you grim cunt.

I will run through your godforesaken Outback Aussie hell hole like the Terminator.

[toonotl 2978]

 

No need. We have Uber.

[Howmanheyman 33169]

 

No need. We have Uber.

But do you have a CT?

 

"Sure, cobber, it may have bin a bit shit on the Aborigines, but rowme wasn't built in a day, sport. I'm sure they're much happier it happened so they now live in a better lifestyle and have running water from an actual tap. Anyway, gotta run, Bruce, it's tinny night tonight, plus an eat-all-u-can barbie too!"

[toonotl 2978]

We too have cabbies who are also massive cunts, yes.

[Rayvin 5217]

[Anorthernsoul 1221]

Raffalution, took them a fortnight to think that one up.

 

 

 

Sunday Monday Raffa days,

Tuesday Wednesday Raffa days,

Thursday Friday Raffa days,

Saturday, Raffa day,

Raffin all week with you.

[PaddockLad 17246]

Raffalution, took them a fortnight to think that one up.

 

 

 

Sunday Monday Raffa days,

Tuesday Wednesday Raffa days,

Thursday Friday Raffa days,

Saturday, Raffa day,

Raffin all week with you.

[PaddockLad 17246]

We too have cabbies who are also massive cunts, yes.

You didn't answer your bell?

[gpirlo68 0]

Newcastle United have this evening confirmed that Fabio Pecchia will be leaving the Club

 

Newcastle United have this evening confirmed that first team coach Fabio Pecchia will be leaving the Club to become manager at Italian club Verona.

 

The Club would like to thank Fabio for his services to Newcastle United during his time with the Magpies, and recognises that this is a fantastic opportunity for him to further his career.

 

Good progress is being made with regard to replacing Pecchia, and a further announcement will be made in the coming days.

[Rayvin 5217]

Um...who? I must be well out of the loop on coaching staff...