An insight from Tomkins:
If Anfield is the outer appearance of Liverpool FC – its face, its skin, its very public expressions – then Melwood is its heart, its guts, its nervous system.
When Rafa BenÃtez personally invites me to meet him for lunch at the legendary training ground, Liverpool have just seen their six-game winning streak come to an end in Italy, but things are still looking good. There is no agenda; just a long overdue chance to say hello, and say thank-you for taking the time to write for the official site for four years.
And it is still only a few months ago that Real Madrid and Manchester United were thrashed, and a genuine title challenge was mounted, despite the 4th-most expensive squad (now 5th) and the 4th-most expensive wage bill (now 5th).
(Anyone who doubts the utterly vital importance of the wages factor, read Soccernomics/Why England Lose; the biggest payers win the biggest prizes more than nine times out of ten.)
tomkins_benitez_small
By the time the meeting takes place, the newspapers are full of ‘crisis’ talk, just months after the best league season that any late-teen Red will have lived through. (The kind of late-teen now spouting off on internet forums about his ineptitude, not that they can conjure such words.)
Inadvertently, I am entering the eye of the storm. Or so I expect. The world is chattering about BenÃtez and his future, and here I am, about to spend part of the morning and almost the entire afternoon with him, chatting one-to-one about the club we both love.
Melwood has clearly come a long way since the days Bill Shankly turned up to find a glorified flea pit. Space-age facilities, pitches that put the lawns at Hampton Court to shame, and a bold red decor; but all fenced off from the world, and autograph hunters, by the same old breeze block brick wall.
I glance across at the legendary hill, constructed for gruelling trudges up and down, and the target boxes divided into nine squares, each with a number painted, the like of which I recall from pictures of Shankly’s time. But otherwise it’s from another planet, not just another era.
Having been on the Kop for the visit of Lyon, I dread the mood as the final 20 minutes sees a win turn to defeat, and more players limp off. I half expect Rafa to cancel, and for everyone to be in a foul mood; a time for inquests and recriminations.
However, I encounter no such despair; morale seems okay (if, understandably, no-one is performing cartwheels and dancing on tables like the cast of Fame). Admittedly I have no prior experience of the place to compare it with, but I am buoyed by the aura.
I get to see some of the training, but of course, there aren’t a lot of fit senior players out there, and it’s only a short, gentle session after the night before.
Around noon, Rafa greets me warmly for the second time that day, only now I will have his full, undivided attention. We head to his office, and within minutes he’s sketching formations on scraps of loose paper.
Despite the ever-widening criticism, this is a man who, over the previous four seasons, has seen his team average 78 points in the league; or the grand total with which Arsene Wenger won his first title. The team Rafa inherited averaged 62 points and did nothing in Europe in Houllier’s final two seasons (in other words, the seasons he was sacked for).
This is a man who has raised around £100m in Champions League qualification and progress, and reached two finals; despite no wealthy benefactors pumping in unlimited funds, and despite contrasting messages from up on high during the past few years that leave many people confused.
This is a man who has never had enough money – crucially – at any one time to put together a squad to match the expense of his rivals’. More than half of what he’s spent he’s recouped in order to make that overall spend, yet he gets credited with having spent mythical amounts.
This is not the ‘70s and ‘80s, when success bred success, as two geniuses held the reins for 24 years, before two other top managers kept things ticking over (and in Dalglish’s case, to a new level of aesthetic brilliance).
This is also not the ‘90s, when Graeme Souness, enjoying the last time the club was as relatively rich as its rivals (pre-Premier League boom, pre-United marketing machine, pre-billionaire backers), broke British records on spending to try and get the Reds back to the top, only to turn them into an awful collection of overweight, disinterested no-hopers, with the odd decent skinny kid thrown in.
Once that money was spent, and the thoroughly decent Roy Evans had been cheated by another record signing, Stan Collymore, who didn’t even bother turning up for training some of the time (but who is now an ‘expert’ on management), Liverpool had become also-rans.
And so I meet BenÃtez during a bad spell for the club, but a bad three months; not a bad three years, to point to the record of one of his critics this week. The club are still in better shape than when Rafa arrived; that ex-manager (Souness) left things in a total mess.
Some more context. At the end of last season, having shown them their best six months in over a decade, Martin O’Neill was being vilified by the Villains. Now he’s great again. Arsene Wenger was being gunned at by Gunners, now he’s back on track. Top managers have bad spells. Shit happens. Well-run clubs stick by good men; bad ones end up like Newcastle.
Why Am I Here?
With everyone from the club making me feel incredibly welcome, any nerves about meeting the man himself have ebbed away. In wandering around the canteen area, I see all of the reserve team playing table tennis and pool, ahead of their own light training before the evening’s game. Then the manager approaches me, and our meeting begins within the techno-zone that is his plush office.
Rafa makes it clear that I am here so that he can say thank-you for my efforts over the past five years, and to let me know that he’s impressed by how much I get right about him and his methods; he finds it unusual that someone takes the time and makes the effort.
Of course, this being Rafa, he points out a couple of things I’ve got wrong. (I like this: it makes me feel that he is not just bullshitting me; and he’s clearly right about what I got wrong.)
He makes it clear that he doesn’t want to colour or influence what I write, but of course, is glad that someone takes on his critics upon his behalf with actual facts, rather than spurious conceits.
I am not asked to change anything I do, nor to do anything for him. He just wants to make sure that when I talk about things like zonal marking, I am aware of the exact way the team line-up, whose job is what, and so on.
I explain that once I was made aware, from the outset in 2005, that he was a regular reader of my column on the official site, I had to make sure I knew what I was talking about; that my main aim was indeed to understand his methods rather than judge him, and that if I did judge him, I better be able to back up what I was saying.
Facts became more important to me than ever before, and when I looked at what kind of budget he was working on (compared with his rivals), or how many games he was winning, and all the other things that go to make up the context, my belief in him grew.
Even very recently, reading a book like Soccernomics/Why England Lose, I found my beliefs backed up, with its ultra-modern approach to the game. (No living in the past in that tome; it’s in a small part about why England fans expect too much based on distant history, but also about how money, and particularly wages, play a bigger part in success than people appreciate.)
Equanimous
The word I’d use to describe the manager is ‘equanimous’, which my dictionary notes as “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, esp. in a difficult situationâ€.
If he doesn’t punch the air in victory, he also won’t punch a player in defeat.
But this is not to say that he is not passionate; on several topics he gets very animated. His love for the club is clear. He desire to succeed his clear. His burning ambition to get the most out of what he has at his disposal is clear.
I find him a warm, welcoming man – nothing like the ludicrous ‘cold’ stereotype – and Melwood is the epitome of professionalism. Other staff members point out that they’ve seen him give lots of encouragement to players, and certainly offers a human touch.
Yes, the conversation is almost exclusively about football, but his office has enough reminders of his family life outside the game to show that he is not some soulless robot, and his humour is clear. And anyway, he didn’t invite me there to talk about that week’s Strictly Come Dancing, did he?
We spend almost four hours over lunch in his personal meeting room, and afterwards in his office, going through tactics, personnel, and almost anything else you care to mention.
It is such a natural, easy conversation, at times I have to remind myself who I am talking with; and ‘with’ is the right word. At no point does he talk at me. And in person, his English is easier to understand than it is with a microphone thrust in his face. (For the record, I took no notes, nor made any recordings; it was just two men talking football.)
After several diagrams sketched on A4 sheets, he leads me to the canteen and shows me the day’s healthy selection. As I stand trying to decide, Alberto Aquilani taps him on the shoulder to ask about the reserve game later that night. They talk briefly in Italian. The boss turns back, and approves of my choice: paella, which I was pleasantly surprised to find amid the pasta dishes.
Later we discuss the new Italian midfielder: an independent expert had told the club that he would be fit for the end of August, but that ended up being pushed back and back. It was frustrating, but Rafa was very happy with what he was now seeing in training – the lad has vision and technique – even if he obviously still has to adapt to the pace of the English game.
(Later, as Rafa shows me around the entire complex, I am shown the special new machine that helped Aquilani train despite the injury.)
The fee is £17m, he tells me, and he points out that John Arne Riise (“a good ladâ€) has just texted him to once again to offer his support, and to say Liverpool have got a real gem in Aquilani.
(I like that a player the manager has sold still texts his old boss; no signs of a lack of affection there, even if Rafa makes it clear that it is obviously not his job to be best mates with his charges, just as Fabio Capello won’t be bonding with his players beyond the acceptable bounds.)
It was a difficult summer, Rafa explains, with Alonso determined to leave and Barcelona niggling away at Mascherano.
The manager certainly wanted to do more business in the market himself, but was unable to. His frustrations are evident, and he lists a few players he went in for; in most cases his interest was well known, but one less so. A shame, I think, when I hear the name. I’m also told of one world-class star in the making that Liverpool made an early approach for in 2007, but before the deal could be tied up, due to dallying, he was lured elsewhere.
We discuss the Alonso situation at length. Rafa made the decision at the end of the midfielder’s fourth season, in 2008; for two years Xabi wasn’t quite cutting it – loads of Kopites were even saying as much – and in Gareth Barry, Rafa had in mind a more robust player, with different qualities and, crucially, an English passport for the changing rules. And with Xabi’s wife expecting a baby, there had been rumblings of a desire to return to Spain.
A new formation was devised, to take into account Barry’s energy and his ability to get up and back, and also to cross with deadly accuracy, but for well-known reasons, the deal fell through.
By then the bridges with Alonso were somewhat burned, and although the Basque had his best-ever season, he had his heart set on leaving. Nothing new there, I know, but nice to have it explained in depth, in person. The player wanted out, and Liverpool got £30m.
Time To Go?
We are briefly interrupted at different times by Sammy Lee and Frank McParland, and I am introduced to both: intense, driven men who share Rafa’s desire for success, and the trustworthy sign of a firm handshake.
I’m not sure if the meeting is supposed to last as long as it is, and I keep asking the boss if he has something else to be doing; but he’s taken training, the physios are doing their job, and Rafa isn’t about to knock off early. It may have been a few hours, but it’s only a small part of his working day.
Even so, I can see how eager he is to have the world understand his ideas, especially when ex-players and the vast majority of the media are clearly hostile and keen to misrepresent him; he knows that unlike some of his rivals, he doesn’t have friends in high places, such as Fleet Street, Sky TV, the League Managers’ Association and the FA. (These are my assumptions; he gives no specifics. But it’s not hard to see which managers work the system for their advantage through old pals networks, and which clubs have greater influence in certain areas.)
Whenever I think I’d better leave him in peace, we get onto another subject. Zonal marking pops up. So, too, does Rafa – from his seat, demonstrating positioning, who should be where, against the backdrop of his broad office window’s glare.
This isn’t enough. A DVD from his extensive library is slipped into the machine, and now he’s showing me how what Liverpool deploy is actually a mix of both zonal and man-marking. I am shown who should be where, and what each individual’s job is; how that job changes depending on which foot the taker is using (inswinger/outswinger); and how there is as much personal responsibility as the alternative – everyone knows their job.
Then he takes me, beat by beat, through other teams, and the gross failings of some man-markers, and also points out several players who, despite being labelled man-markers, are marking zones! (men on the posts, and others here and there.) We look at a side who are very successful at defending set-pieces, and he shows me how they defend a similar way to the Reds (and holy shit, they do!); they just happen to have a lot of tall players.
Unfortunately, tall players who are also technically gifted, as all-rounders, cost more money; you can buy giants who can defend set-pieces, but can’t then play the game in the manner you require.
If you want very good footballers like Mascherano, Benayoun and Insua, then, as with most things in life, there’s a flip side. Good footballers who are also imposing physical specimens cost a premium. And even Chelsea, with their giants and noted headers of a ball, have conceded four set-piece goals in their last two away games.
(to be continued below)
If Anfield is the outer appearance of Liverpool FC – its face, its skin, its very public expressions – then Melwood is its heart, its guts, its nervous system.
When Rafa BenÃtez personally invites me to meet him for lunch at the legendary training ground, Liverpool have just seen their six-game winning streak come to an end in Italy, but things are still looking good. There is no agenda; just a long overdue chance to say hello, and say thank-you for taking the time to write for the official site for four years.
And it is still only a few months ago that Real Madrid and Manchester United were thrashed, and a genuine title challenge was mounted, despite the 4th-most expensive squad (now 5th) and the 4th-most expensive wage bill (now 5th).
(Anyone who doubts the utterly vital importance of the wages factor, read Soccernomics/Why England Lose; the biggest payers win the biggest prizes more than nine times out of ten.)
tomkins_benitez_small
By the time the meeting takes place, the newspapers are full of ‘crisis’ talk, just months after the best league season that any late-teen Red will have lived through. (The kind of late-teen now spouting off on internet forums about his ineptitude, not that they can conjure such words.)
Inadvertently, I am entering the eye of the storm. Or so I expect. The world is chattering about BenÃtez and his future, and here I am, about to spend part of the morning and almost the entire afternoon with him, chatting one-to-one about the club we both love.
Melwood has clearly come a long way since the days Bill Shankly turned up to find a glorified flea pit. Space-age facilities, pitches that put the lawns at Hampton Court to shame, and a bold red decor; but all fenced off from the world, and autograph hunters, by the same old breeze block brick wall.
I glance across at the legendary hill, constructed for gruelling trudges up and down, and the target boxes divided into nine squares, each with a number painted, the like of which I recall from pictures of Shankly’s time. But otherwise it’s from another planet, not just another era.
Having been on the Kop for the visit of Lyon, I dread the mood as the final 20 minutes sees a win turn to defeat, and more players limp off. I half expect Rafa to cancel, and for everyone to be in a foul mood; a time for inquests and recriminations.
However, I encounter no such despair; morale seems okay (if, understandably, no-one is performing cartwheels and dancing on tables like the cast of Fame). Admittedly I have no prior experience of the place to compare it with, but I am buoyed by the aura.
I get to see some of the training, but of course, there aren’t a lot of fit senior players out there, and it’s only a short, gentle session after the night before.
Around noon, Rafa greets me warmly for the second time that day, only now I will have his full, undivided attention. We head to his office, and within minutes he’s sketching formations on scraps of loose paper.
Despite the ever-widening criticism, this is a man who, over the previous four seasons, has seen his team average 78 points in the league; or the grand total with which Arsene Wenger won his first title. The team Rafa inherited averaged 62 points and did nothing in Europe in Houllier’s final two seasons (in other words, the seasons he was sacked for).
This is a man who has raised around £100m in Champions League qualification and progress, and reached two finals; despite no wealthy benefactors pumping in unlimited funds, and despite contrasting messages from up on high during the past few years that leave many people confused.
This is a man who has never had enough money – crucially – at any one time to put together a squad to match the expense of his rivals’. More than half of what he’s spent he’s recouped in order to make that overall spend, yet he gets credited with having spent mythical amounts.
This is not the ‘70s and ‘80s, when success bred success, as two geniuses held the reins for 24 years, before two other top managers kept things ticking over (and in Dalglish’s case, to a new level of aesthetic brilliance).
This is also not the ‘90s, when Graeme Souness, enjoying the last time the club was as relatively rich as its rivals (pre-Premier League boom, pre-United marketing machine, pre-billionaire backers), broke British records on spending to try and get the Reds back to the top, only to turn them into an awful collection of overweight, disinterested no-hopers, with the odd decent skinny kid thrown in.
Once that money was spent, and the thoroughly decent Roy Evans had been cheated by another record signing, Stan Collymore, who didn’t even bother turning up for training some of the time (but who is now an ‘expert’ on management), Liverpool had become also-rans.
And so I meet BenÃtez during a bad spell for the club, but a bad three months; not a bad three years, to point to the record of one of his critics this week. The club are still in better shape than when Rafa arrived; that ex-manager (Souness) left things in a total mess.
Some more context. At the end of last season, having shown them their best six months in over a decade, Martin O’Neill was being vilified by the Villains. Now he’s great again. Arsene Wenger was being gunned at by Gunners, now he’s back on track. Top managers have bad spells. Shit happens. Well-run clubs stick by good men; bad ones end up like Newcastle.
Why Am I Here?
With everyone from the club making me feel incredibly welcome, any nerves about meeting the man himself have ebbed away. In wandering around the canteen area, I see all of the reserve team playing table tennis and pool, ahead of their own light training before the evening’s game. Then the manager approaches me, and our meeting begins within the techno-zone that is his plush office.
Rafa makes it clear that I am here so that he can say thank-you for my efforts over the past five years, and to let me know that he’s impressed by how much I get right about him and his methods; he finds it unusual that someone takes the time and makes the effort.
Of course, this being Rafa, he points out a couple of things I’ve got wrong. (I like this: it makes me feel that he is not just bullshitting me; and he’s clearly right about what I got wrong.)
He makes it clear that he doesn’t want to colour or influence what I write, but of course, is glad that someone takes on his critics upon his behalf with actual facts, rather than spurious conceits.
I am not asked to change anything I do, nor to do anything for him. He just wants to make sure that when I talk about things like zonal marking, I am aware of the exact way the team line-up, whose job is what, and so on.
I explain that once I was made aware, from the outset in 2005, that he was a regular reader of my column on the official site, I had to make sure I knew what I was talking about; that my main aim was indeed to understand his methods rather than judge him, and that if I did judge him, I better be able to back up what I was saying.
Facts became more important to me than ever before, and when I looked at what kind of budget he was working on (compared with his rivals), or how many games he was winning, and all the other things that go to make up the context, my belief in him grew.
Even very recently, reading a book like Soccernomics/Why England Lose, I found my beliefs backed up, with its ultra-modern approach to the game. (No living in the past in that tome; it’s in a small part about why England fans expect too much based on distant history, but also about how money, and particularly wages, play a bigger part in success than people appreciate.)
Equanimous
The word I’d use to describe the manager is ‘equanimous’, which my dictionary notes as “mental calmness, composure, and evenness of temper, esp. in a difficult situationâ€.
If he doesn’t punch the air in victory, he also won’t punch a player in defeat.
But this is not to say that he is not passionate; on several topics he gets very animated. His love for the club is clear. He desire to succeed his clear. His burning ambition to get the most out of what he has at his disposal is clear.
I find him a warm, welcoming man – nothing like the ludicrous ‘cold’ stereotype – and Melwood is the epitome of professionalism. Other staff members point out that they’ve seen him give lots of encouragement to players, and certainly offers a human touch.
Yes, the conversation is almost exclusively about football, but his office has enough reminders of his family life outside the game to show that he is not some soulless robot, and his humour is clear. And anyway, he didn’t invite me there to talk about that week’s Strictly Come Dancing, did he?
We spend almost four hours over lunch in his personal meeting room, and afterwards in his office, going through tactics, personnel, and almost anything else you care to mention.
It is such a natural, easy conversation, at times I have to remind myself who I am talking with; and ‘with’ is the right word. At no point does he talk at me. And in person, his English is easier to understand than it is with a microphone thrust in his face. (For the record, I took no notes, nor made any recordings; it was just two men talking football.)
After several diagrams sketched on A4 sheets, he leads me to the canteen and shows me the day’s healthy selection. As I stand trying to decide, Alberto Aquilani taps him on the shoulder to ask about the reserve game later that night. They talk briefly in Italian. The boss turns back, and approves of my choice: paella, which I was pleasantly surprised to find amid the pasta dishes.
Later we discuss the new Italian midfielder: an independent expert had told the club that he would be fit for the end of August, but that ended up being pushed back and back. It was frustrating, but Rafa was very happy with what he was now seeing in training – the lad has vision and technique – even if he obviously still has to adapt to the pace of the English game.
(Later, as Rafa shows me around the entire complex, I am shown the special new machine that helped Aquilani train despite the injury.)
The fee is £17m, he tells me, and he points out that John Arne Riise (“a good ladâ€) has just texted him to once again to offer his support, and to say Liverpool have got a real gem in Aquilani.
(I like that a player the manager has sold still texts his old boss; no signs of a lack of affection there, even if Rafa makes it clear that it is obviously not his job to be best mates with his charges, just as Fabio Capello won’t be bonding with his players beyond the acceptable bounds.)
It was a difficult summer, Rafa explains, with Alonso determined to leave and Barcelona niggling away at Mascherano.
The manager certainly wanted to do more business in the market himself, but was unable to. His frustrations are evident, and he lists a few players he went in for; in most cases his interest was well known, but one less so. A shame, I think, when I hear the name. I’m also told of one world-class star in the making that Liverpool made an early approach for in 2007, but before the deal could be tied up, due to dallying, he was lured elsewhere.
We discuss the Alonso situation at length. Rafa made the decision at the end of the midfielder’s fourth season, in 2008; for two years Xabi wasn’t quite cutting it – loads of Kopites were even saying as much – and in Gareth Barry, Rafa had in mind a more robust player, with different qualities and, crucially, an English passport for the changing rules. And with Xabi’s wife expecting a baby, there had been rumblings of a desire to return to Spain.
A new formation was devised, to take into account Barry’s energy and his ability to get up and back, and also to cross with deadly accuracy, but for well-known reasons, the deal fell through.
By then the bridges with Alonso were somewhat burned, and although the Basque had his best-ever season, he had his heart set on leaving. Nothing new there, I know, but nice to have it explained in depth, in person. The player wanted out, and Liverpool got £30m.
Time To Go?
We are briefly interrupted at different times by Sammy Lee and Frank McParland, and I am introduced to both: intense, driven men who share Rafa’s desire for success, and the trustworthy sign of a firm handshake.
I’m not sure if the meeting is supposed to last as long as it is, and I keep asking the boss if he has something else to be doing; but he’s taken training, the physios are doing their job, and Rafa isn’t about to knock off early. It may have been a few hours, but it’s only a small part of his working day.
Even so, I can see how eager he is to have the world understand his ideas, especially when ex-players and the vast majority of the media are clearly hostile and keen to misrepresent him; he knows that unlike some of his rivals, he doesn’t have friends in high places, such as Fleet Street, Sky TV, the League Managers’ Association and the FA. (These are my assumptions; he gives no specifics. But it’s not hard to see which managers work the system for their advantage through old pals networks, and which clubs have greater influence in certain areas.)
Whenever I think I’d better leave him in peace, we get onto another subject. Zonal marking pops up. So, too, does Rafa – from his seat, demonstrating positioning, who should be where, against the backdrop of his broad office window’s glare.
This isn’t enough. A DVD from his extensive library is slipped into the machine, and now he’s showing me how what Liverpool deploy is actually a mix of both zonal and man-marking. I am shown who should be where, and what each individual’s job is; how that job changes depending on which foot the taker is using (inswinger/outswinger); and how there is as much personal responsibility as the alternative – everyone knows their job.
Then he takes me, beat by beat, through other teams, and the gross failings of some man-markers, and also points out several players who, despite being labelled man-markers, are marking zones! (men on the posts, and others here and there.) We look at a side who are very successful at defending set-pieces, and he shows me how they defend a similar way to the Reds (and holy shit, they do!); they just happen to have a lot of tall players.
Unfortunately, tall players who are also technically gifted, as all-rounders, cost more money; you can buy giants who can defend set-pieces, but can’t then play the game in the manner you require.
If you want very good footballers like Mascherano, Benayoun and Insua, then, as with most things in life, there’s a flip side. Good footballers who are also imposing physical specimens cost a premium. And even Chelsea, with their giants and noted headers of a ball, have conceded four set-piece goals in their last two away games.
(to be continued below)