épieur

tbh, wtf is rafa thinking with this? If I were an Inter fan I'd be properly ticked off with him. He has not earned the right to be playing hardball there yet. He has a responsibility to that team to do everything he can within his power to make them as good as they can be, but he seems more determined that things must be done his way or not at all. It's unprofessional.

I'd love it. I think I'd love to hate him almost as much as I'd love to hate Hodgson if he somehow became successful and we'd all have to bite the bullet.

that was a gem. Especially once Cole retorted that he didn't recognise that analysis at all, felt very confident and couldn't understand where all this was coming from.

he was disturbingly upbeat about Poulsen's prospects after he had one game where he didn't stand out as being utterly below par.

yup. definitely back on the ether again.

Dear god. It galls me that plenty of managers have been harshly sacked this season already, yet this chancer is shown clemency. It's been a while since he's thrown out a beaut like this though. Perhaps he's been laying off the ether this month, before relapsing due to the christmas spirit.

Doubt PFK and RH would be happy with that. PFK's mum would though.

not sure how it started, but I suspect having met them some many fecking times in knock-out tournaments there's been plenty of opportunities for mudslinging to go around to cement the antipathy they share. Though Rafa seems to have saved the worst of his private bile for Ferguson.

IIRC he is the highest paid player in the premiership. truly mad.

Kenny for me. Not sure who would be the right longterm choice at the moment and he is the obvious choice as caretaker. Also, I'd like to see him use these six months to make a bid for being more than caretaker.

I didn't exactly watch them week in and week out, but I saw enough to form an impression. Loved watching la liga then as there were more good teams to watch. They were very good, but too often not exactly inspiring to watch, albeit very effective. They'd grind teams down, but so did our 08/09 side and they steamrollered teams in style more often to boot. Can't agree with top 5 over the decade at all. Not when you factor in the sides Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester, Barcelona, Real Madrid and Bayern Munich have had since 00. My immediate impression of that was how Tomkins deserves round-spread condemnation for his blithe acceptance of Hodgson staying put till the summer.

Rafa would make the shortlist in the imaginary world where my opinion matters. What I disagree with is how uncritically he seems to jump straight to the top of the list for so many people. I think a very thorough scouting and sounding of potential candidates would be well in order before considering whether to approach Benitez. Quite. Perhaps I failed to make it clear that while I am qualifying his achievements in Spain somewhat with that argument, it is really as much a reflection of the impressive job he did do in the premiership in more challenging circumstances than he faced in Spain.

Probably was. After all, we won the CL while finishing 5th, so it doesn't necessarily speak much of the challenges faced in the league. These are Rafa (and pako's) own words in assessing the different challenges between managing Valencia and Liverpool. They certainly felt it was easier to win those titles than to win the premiership.

They were good no doubt, but they did so with less than impressive point tallies for a title win. Point tallies Rafa soon eclipsed in a premiership arguably more challenging than la liga. Rafa came in at a time when Mourinho raised the bar significantly for winning the league which is why it wasn't reflected in title wins here. I don't think he did a better job (even if he won more) with Valencia than he did for us though. The fact that our European exploits were consistently better than what he did with Valencia shows to me that his Liverpool sides were overall of greater quality than his Valencia team.

Yup. Although I wasn't too upset at his departure (in the vain hope that there were competent replacements out there. f*** off, Cecil) I did want him to stay at the time and he had my support and I was and am more than prepared to defend his credentials at the time. That was a very different situation to bringing him back now. Even more so in the light of him having just been sacked at a club largely perceived to be almost optimally geared for success when he took over.

Rafa's Valencia side was altogether overrated due to their impressive displays against us. Imo, Rafa's Liverpool eclipsed it in quality well before 08/09. The 08/09 might well have been a match for Rijkaard's in terms of quality. If it wasn't, it's not far off. If I could believe that Rafa was likely to reproduce a side like that, I'd be all for him coming back. But you have to say his transfer strategy in the summer leading up to that season and ever since has not exactly inspired confidence that he would be able to identify the right players to make that happen. G&H must take significant blame for limiting his budget but Rafa didn't likewise spend the money he was given very well at all. The confidence the squad has in him is also an unknown. We don't know how many were glad to see him go, but it would be silly to think there weren't at least a few. The fact is both the external circumstances and Rafa's own performance since that season have stacked the deck against him in all ways if he were to return. I'd rather a manager who doesn't have such a mountain to climb when he joins.

All a bit cringeworthy if you ask me. Surely we can find a gifted manager who doesn't have the look of having lost the plot these past 18 months. Not that I would be terribly aggravated if he did come back. There's a good manager in there somewhere still, but the blinkers with which Liverpool fans look at this is starting to get embarassing. There are other managers out there and it would be better for Liverpool FC if we could find a gifted and talented manager who is not Rafael Benitez. All this 'meant to be', 'job unfinished' 'he gets us' is just romantic nonsense that confirms the perception of rival fans that Liverpool fans are altogether deluded when it comes to Rafa. If he did come back, the knives would be out before before the ink was even dry, not just from the press but from significant segments of the fanbase as well. He won't enjoy patience, honeymoon period or 'settling in' from many quarters. I think it more likely we'd be looking at a scenario of an awkward sacking within the year accompanied by much gloating in the press at the silliness of it all than the glorious return fans seem to think is destined to happen if only he's given the chance. Rafa, by own admission, won the league in a period of decline for both barca and real. That's what made it possible. Rijkaard then took that barca team on the decline and made them as good as they had been since the cruyff era, winning only their second ever european cup to boot. He may have had more to work with, but most of that was brought in and/or developed into what they became under his tenure. The end result, it has to be said, was nevertheless a better and more succesful team than anything Rafa has produced to date. I agree that his decline has been more pronounced since then, but I think there's a lot of red blinkers going on in rating the two respectively. Their CVs are not that different on merit and Rijkaard has the added benefit of not coming with the kind of baggage Benitez would carry with him.

Put it this way: how many of those who want him back are impressed with Rijkaard's cv these days? Both managers with impressive accomplishments to their name now struggling to keep it up.

Meh. He is not so old that he would not have plenty of time to identify a suitable replacement for when his eventual retirement comes about. We don't need longterm planning right away. We need competence right away who are actually qualified to make these long term plans.

I don't want him back. It would be romantic and defeatist on an almost newcastle-keeganesque scale to have him return on the back of a failed season with us further compounded by radical failure with a team all geared for success. Perhaps some years from now, if he has added to his CV in a convincing manner to demonstrate that his star is a fair bit higher in the footballing world than when he left us I'd welcome him back. But that seems a big if at the moment.

No. It would be galling to see his smirking face on how he was right all along and having to endure his press conferences and coming to terms with the fact that I just plain don't very much like him. It would also be rather hard to swallow all the stuff I've said and thought about him if he were succesful. But there can be no substitute for success. If he suddenly started winning all the time he can say and do whatever the f*ck he wants, provided it doesn't stray too far from the 'I'm a senile ether-intoxicated prideful old man' territory we've seen so far. He'd have my backing.

it may also have something to do with him being a sight more prolific now.

Get him!

"he's a t***."

I just realised today that Lucas has become my favourite Liverpool player in the void left by Alonso. Reckon that puts me in most exclusive company.