After what seemed like an eternity of unjust support form Scousers that could remember one night in Istanbul above all else, Benitez was finally removed from Liverpool office, impeached and shamed worse than Richard Nixon. History will not remember him as fondly it seems, his woeful legacy still there at Anfield in the form of the worst Liverpool team in living memory, a side so wretched in its ability that it has aged the already far from fresh faced Roy Hodgson years in the few months he has had to try and work with it.
Of course, the truth is that team that somehow triumphed in Istanbul that night were hardly a collection of world beaters. If ever you need a strong argument for trophies not equating to talent you need look no further than Djimi Traore sporting a Champions League medal. Yet that was the kind of voodoo that Benitez was famous for, that a side that could falter against lowly minnows on the weekend could defeat the cream of Europe come midweek with the same eleven out there on the field. It baffled almost everyone, perhaps most tellingly Benitez himself, but in the end the Liverpool fans could forgive near misses domestically in exchange for the European glory on which they had been raised.
Then came the decline… Fans winced as their manager spent millions to consistently lower the quality in the squad, while world class players such as Xabi Alonso were marginalised and made to feel unwelcome. But there was that night in Istanbul, he had to know what he was doing, right? There was a master plan at work, something so complex and intricate that only a football genius could see it. Forget that he’d spent in excess of £200 million, only taking back just over a third of that in sales, yet would waste no time in decrying how unfair it was that teams such as Chelsea and Man City could simply spend at will. No, it couldn’t be that he had simply gone mad, could it?
Now Benitez is at Inter Milan, the current European Champions and a team that had won five consecutive scudettos, and suddenly the side is floundering. After just seven months he looks already out the door. Public arguments with an Italian chairman rarely end in the favour of the coach and ultimately it is the fans that will largely dictate your fate. He may well have had an impossible act to follow in the form of “the special one” but Benitez has failed spectacularly and it exposes what many in the industry had known for some time – that his ego had eclipsed his sensibilities.
Any run of the mill coach could have inherited that side and simply “challenged” for the title, finishing within the top four and putting it down to “aging players” or the need for reinvigoration. It takes ineptitude of a special calibre to guide that team to seventh in the table and have them thirteen points adrift from the title at this stage in the season. Evidence of his delusions of grandeur are clear at almost every press conference. Who else but a foaming lunatic would come out after beating TP Mazembe, a side from the Congo, a paltry 3-0 in the World Club Cup final and then demanding full backing from the board as if the trophy meant anything at all?
Yet it was clear he was somewhere other than this reality after his string of bizarre ramblings made in public that made Cantona’s philosophies seem like the most profound haikus. If anyone can make sense of the claim regarding Roy Hodgson that “some people cannot see a priest on a mountain of sugar.” This is not a cultural reference – even the Spanish press were baffled at what was happening to a coach that was at one time held in the highest regard domestically. Now, he seemed more like a national embarrassment. Hodgson’s provocation for this outburst had simply been to criticise his transfer record. How anyone could defend it would make them as crazy as Benitez.
It was only a short time before that he had also babbled about “white liquid in a bottle has to be milk” and “white liquid in a bottle. If I see John the milkman in the Wirral, where I was living, with this bottle, I’d say, ‘It’s milk, sure” when speaking of the situation at Liverpool, before putting the blame for the club’s decline squarely on the shoulders of the board, the new director of football and indeed anyone else but him. It was a classless act of cryptic gibberish, an attempt to rewrite history that would have shamed Josef Stalin and it might just have worked had Inter gone on to be even vaguely successful under his brief tenure.
Benitez will almost certainly be putting more than milk in his morning coffee today with the wheels clearly in motion to remove him from his position at Inter. It may cost the club millions to do it, especially if their legal team somehow fail to prove he is unfit for tenure, but if there is one thing history has shown us it is that the Italians will not lose face in public under any circumstances. With this in mind Benitez needs to find some more of that voodoo he used to convince a nation that he was one of the most gifted coaches in the game. The juju bag seems to be empty, however with such dark forces you can never be sure.
Of course, it could simply be that Benitez was little more than a charlatan, another journeyman manager who lucked out and then could never repeat the miracle. If that is the case, which it almost certainly is, it is his seemingly doomed spell at Inter that will prove it, rather than the state of disrepair he left Liverpool in as he walked out the door, weighed down with the ill gotten gains of a con artist.