Rafa Benitez usually has an answer for everything, but during his first few weeks with Newcastle United, he may have been tempted to throw his hands up, look around the room and ask, “This one is beyond me. Anyone got any ideas?”
It took him five games to record his first win at Newcastle United’s manager, five games which included defeats against Leicester, Norwich and, most pitifully, Southampton. This looked a team beyond a quick-fix, and beyond a slow-fix as well.
Since then there has been a gradual improvement, but it has been so gradual that it may have come too late. Newcastle recovered from being two goals down at half-time to draw at Anfield last weekend.
Both sets of supporters chanted his name. “It was emotional because the Liverpool fans were singing my name and it was emotional because the Newcastle fans were singing my name afterwards,” Benitez said later.
For those who don’t get Benitez, this admission of human feelings may have come as a surprise. To them, he is a remote and austere man, a man described by Steven Gerrard as “ice-cold”. Gerrard’s analysis may be right, but he has always seemed to be in need of deep and endless reassurance, something that may not have been readily available from Benitez.
Benitez doesn’t come across as the distant man of that stereotype. Gerrard says the first question Benitez asked Gerrard’s mother when he met her in 2004 was, ‘Does Steven like money?’ This would seem strange in most men, but then you recall that when Jonjo Shelvey’s mother first met Benitez, he used the time wisely by explaining to her how best to counter Stoke City’s long-ball game, something she hadn’t knowingly expressed any interest in.
Some have come to find this funny rather than heartless. Benitez is not cold, he can be warm and affectionate but when he is being warm and affectionate, there is still only one subject: football. He has a profound lack of interest in smalltalk.
In fact, he may have a lack of interest in any talk that isn’t football. There is no hinterland for Benitez beyond his family and the game. This is the man who once heard his coaches having a conversation before training one morning, and he couldn’t place the man they were talking about.
He scanned his own mental database of all the European leagues, wondering who it was and, when he finally couldn’t figured it out, he asked them who is this guy Tony Soprano and what team does he play for? When it was explained to him that it wasn’t a Serie B full-back, his coaches were left with the impression that they had all been diminished by talking about something other than football.
Perhaps this is why Benitez has been embraced by the Newcastle fans, even if defeat against Alan Pardew’s Crystal Palace on Saturday could move them desperately close to relegation.
Some might be baffled by this, but perhaps they glimpsed in Benitez’s obsessiveness something of their own.
Newcastle is a one-club city that thinks of little other than football as well, and in Benitez they have a man who thinks like they do. Only more so.
It might be best for Benitez if he stayed at the club even if they are relegated. It might be hard for him, a manager who believes he should be coaching at a Champions League club, to consider the possibility of preparing a side for a game against Rotherham or, possibly Burton Albion, but he might not get a chance like this again.
He may get a big club again, but he needs something else too.
Benitez works best when, paradoxically given the general view of him, he has some love and understanding to protect him when his decisions are particularly baffling or stubborn. The Liverpool supporters might have been divided on Benitez by the end, but he had the adoration of many. They tolerated his eccentricities and his strange ways because they knew he was thinking about nothing other than football, although sometimes he can get caught up in the politics of football as well.
At Chelsea, he had no leeway from supporters, but it was an insight into his resolve that he managed to keep going at the club, winning the Europa League while returning Chelsea to the top four.
Many of the players enjoyed working for him too, something that is more widespread than is believed as well, especially when reading the recollections of Gerrard or, more recently, Jerzy Dudek.
Players like Pepe Reina and Javier Mascherano have plenty of time for Benitez, having reconciled themselves to the fact that he is unlikely to ask them if they had managed to get away anywhere nice recently, unless it was a way of finding out if they wanted to go on a scouting mission.
The players at Newcastle will respond too, but whether it can be enough from their position in the league is debatable.
The supporters will want him to stay, no matter what happens, confident in the knowledge that they have an independent man who cares only for football.
Unlike previous recent managers, he is not a corporate man, even if being a Mike Ashley corporate man is a very different thing. Pardew’s time at the club has been viewed differently in retrospect, but he never endeared himself to the supporters.
Previously they had been wary of the “Cockney mafia” and it may be that they are more likely to warm to a man who is so clearly an outsider than to someone with the self-conscious knowingness of some previous managers.
Ashley appears to have tired of football, saying recently that he and Newcastle were “stuck with each other” and expressing regret for every getting involved in football in the first place. Newcastle supporters might feel the same way.
But at least they have a manager who understands them now, even if he is never likely to say it. But it will have meaning for him and he will respond the only way he understands: through work and talking about football.
