What a difference a Premiership game makes
Oct 19 2005
By Len Capeling, Daily Post
NO-ONE need doubt Liverpool's love of Europe. It is the arena where Rafael Benitez demonstrates the lucidity of his tactical thinking.
Invariably, his strategems are the correct ones and Liverpool's players - especially the Spanish contingent - appear to revel in the slower pace and the absence of domestic cloggers. Anderlecht will be taken seriously, but they don't look a power even by
Belgian standards, and you'd expect Liverpool to make another giant stride towards the knockout phases.
But what a difference in the Premiership.
Here Liverpool look depressingly workaday.
A genius in European terms, Rafael Benitez finds the Premier League difficult to grasp.
It will come, eventually, one hopes, even if the match against Blackburn did little to enhance his status.
Rafa's strengths were there - organisation,, focus - but,, Xabi Alonso apart, there was little in the way of artistic merit. Yet how can this be?
UEFA Cups, Champions League - a natural.. Bread and butter domestic games - at least in England - a walk on the dull and duller side.
Peter Crouch may answer more questions tonight.
So might the enigmatic Fernando Morientes and the mercurial Djibril Cisse.
But it could still require the kind of alchemy that Benitez does not possess to get one good striker out of the three of them.
Something along the llines of a young Alan Shearer, full of goals, full of running, a desire to be the best for a decade or more.
Sadly, until the January transfer window open again, we shall continue to wonder where a guaranteed supply of Premiership goals is coming from.
And no, I'm not forgetting Cisse's thunderbolt against 10-man Blackburn.
* LIVERPOOL will never forget the old Heysel even in the gleaming surroundings of new Heysel.
Remembering that terrible night, when so many died, they will demand nothing less than impeccable behaviours from their travelling supporters.
I'm sure they'll get it - the presence of what is likely to be a Brussels police force unlikely to tolerate the slightest misbehaviour.
The time to admire more than despise?
WHENEVER Wayne Rooney shines - like every week - I have this crazy vision of Everton fans one day preaching forgiveness.
It would be a tremendous gesture on the part of over-whelmingly generous supporters, who might like to remember what the young giant did for the profile of the team while wearing Royal Blue.
His exploits for England will be cheered by every British fan next summer, not least in the Red and Blue halves of Merseyside.
Wouldn't it be wonderful, in the meantime, if the bitterest Evertonian could enjoy Rooney as something special, instead of working old hatreds to rest?
Crazy? I hope not.
* SAM ALLARDYCE insists that had Michael Essien been red-carded for his JCB challenge on Tal Ben Haim, Bolton would have beaten runaway leaders Chelsea.
As with much that Sam says, this is now unprovable.
Especially as Allardyce makes no mention of the fact that both sides would have finished the game with 10 men, and I suspect Chelsea's 10 would have been too for Bolton's one-dimensional scrappers.
Buffoon Blatter deludes himself
SEPP BLATTER doesn't want you to know he earns up to £1.25m a year.
He has a good reason for being so coy. It allows him to criticise what he describes as greedy footballers, earning salaries far beyond their talents.
Like so many of the world's fat-cat football administrators, Blatter is a buffoon.
He travels in airconditioned luxury while expecting soccer stars to make do with steerage.
He earns vast amounts of money yet accuses football of living beyond its means.
Blatter has no self-knowledge.
He sees himself as one of the game's great visionaries, even though most of his pronouncements produce jeers and laughter. Remember, this was the man who wanted to increase interest in football by making the goals bigger.
He also suggested that women's soccer would have greater appeal if participants wore tighter shorts.
A mediocrity among mediocrities, FIFA's ludicrous president has the happy knack of saying the wrong things most of the time while deluding himself that his words are the stuff of world wisdom.
No wonder he's such a priceless figure of fun.
