Rafa Benitez is Alex Ferguson - just 20 years later

By Brian Reade

Published 06:08 24/10/09

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One man inside Anfield tomorrow will know, better than any other, the pressure Rafa Benitez is under.

Someone who understands just how isolated a manager can feel when things go wrong at a club with massive expectations. How your mind and body aches for the break that will restore self-belief.

This is what that man said after his side were thrashed at Manchester City 20 years ago, and the vultures scented his blood.

"What I have felt in the last week you wouldn't think should happen in football. Every time someone looks at me I feel I have betrayed them. You feel as if you have to sneak round corners, as if you are some kind of criminal. But that is only because you care about the supporters. And these people have been waiting 22 years to win the League."

That man was Alex Ferguson. Like Benitez he had yet to reach 50, had won League titles and a European trophy with an unfancied team in a foreign country, and been lured to northern England to breathe life into one of the biggest names in world football.

But after three trophyless years faced widespread calls for his head. Like Benitez, he was attacked for selling decent players (Gordon Strachan, Norman Whiteside and Paul McGrath) and spending three times as much on mediocre replacements (Mike Phelan, Neil Webb and Danny Wallace).

If only Fergie was on speaking terms with Benitez he'd tell him that you can not only survive these crises, you can blind your critics with the glint of silver for years to come. But the pair aren't even on glancing terms, so his only desire tomorrow will be to bang another nail in the Spaniard's coffin.

The man who was a whisker - or is that a Macheda - away from knocking Fergie off his perch in May, now seems to have more people after him than Osama bin Laden. Benitez has never had the media on his side or even every Kopite, but the majority of fans have backed him.

According to the vultures, defeat tomorrow would see him lose those fans and then his job. I don't believe he'll lose either. Not least because the club is run in such a shambolic manner it hasn't the money, will or leadership to sack him.

And even if it did, who would replace him? Jose Mourinho? Would he join a club run by charlatans who this summer gave their manager a net spend of nothing to make that final step to the title? Kenny Dalglish? Would he want all that pressure again, two decades after left him mentally shattered?

Benitez has made mistakes, but he has also made Liverpool a European force and genuine title contenders again. His sub-standard squad is down to him.

But it is even more down to the buffoons who sold Liverpool short (David Moores and Rick Parry) and the cowboys who bought it solely to turn a quick buck.

Benitez doesn't deserve the sack. He deserves what Fergie got 20 years ago, just as United were about to make the biggest mistake in their history. An unremarkable goal from an unremarkable player, which silenced the snipers and gave him the breathing space to keep building his empire.

When the Titanic sank the last visible word on its hull was "Liverpool." Rafa's sinking team has in front of it tomorrow the biggest life-boat afloat. It's called Manchester United.

It's up to those players to grab it for their manager the way Mark Robins did for Fergie.

God knows there's enough of them turning in unremarkable performances who owe him one.