No one, came the message, beats me at this game.For a manager who has given up little of himself since he moved to England last summer with his wife, Montse, it was a charming moment of eccentricity and the image of a young Rafa painstakingly setting up his Stratego army for battle is equally beguiling. Last month, very much unprovoked, Benitez lectured a group of slightly bemused reporters at some length about his passion for the game. He talked them through the rules, and the strategy of Stratego, but most of all he emphasised, with earnest intensity, his own supremacy at it. When Liverpool-watchers cast their minds back for some shred of detail about Benitez’s personality, all that comes up is an old, military board game.Stratego, to be precise – first released by the Milton Bradley corporation in 1961 and moderately popular among Spanish kids growing up in the 1970s. For Liverpool’s manager there have been no grand public avowals of love for his family, no cryptic newspaper columns hinting at courageous personal battles against sinister hidden powers.
He arrived from Valencia with two league titles, one Uefa Cup and an impeccable reputation and he has used an everyman aspect, and inexhaustible good humour, as a shield around his personality.Benitez, it is widely accepted, has given away less about himself in the course of the season than his opposite number, Jose Mourinho, reveals in the average 15 minutes. His team are in the Champions’ League semi-finals tonight, the cult of the foreign manager grips the nation, but Benitez, and the forces that drive him, has remained Anfield’s best-kept secret.
Unassuming and unflappable. The patient demeanour of a sixth-form careers adviser with no great passion for sharp suits and carrying a little extra around the waist. It is an unlikely profile for a 45-year-old man who has been trusted with restoring the greatness of Britain’s most successful-ever football club. For three months this summer, Liverpool’s new manager polished his command of the English language until every sub-clause was in place and every sentence ran smooth and, when he was finally satisfied, he mastered the art of saying nothing.
Rafael Benitez is English football’s politest refusenik. “I have managed big clubs in the past and this is a very big football club.”But asked what he had learnt about himself, he added: “Absolutely nothing I know what I am made of.”. I have had to endure – and I think it is endure – like the supporters have, it has been difficult at times.”It has been a difficult season at times, things I have not had to put up with in previous jobs – but I was warned about that before I came here,” Souness said. Moscow Flyer fell victim to Rathgar Beau, a horse he has cowed on several previous occasions, perhaps also victim to father time. Jessica Harrington, the 1-4 favourite’s trainer, smiled beforehand and she smiled in the aftermath “What’s the point in being disappointed?” she said “The horse is a fantastic horse.
No other horse has done what he has and he’s finally been beaten.”It was a violent denmouement to what appeared to be a well-established script. Moscow Flyer certainly did not appear a diminished animal in the preliminaries. He was a sprightly figure as his audience recognised the champion with sporadic applause. The seasoned one settled into a metronomic gallop as well, behind the pace-setting Colca Canyon and Mossy Green.
There was a pleasing sense of inevitability when Moscow Flyer jumped to the front at the fourth last, even if it was not a convincing vault which took him there. Indeed, for some reason not known to man, the great horse has never jumped well at his local track. The accident waiting to happen yesterday came at the second last, which seems to be in a permanent black spot for Moscow Flyer. Two years ago he did not recognise its very existence and unseated Barry Geraghty.