Sacking Benitez Would Be Madness

Football has lost its sense of perspective - every result these days is greeted with near hysteria - if a team wins, they are the greatest on earth, if they lose, they are the worst. Nowhere is the hysteria more evident than on the internet (often from people who rarely or never attend actual games). And nowhere is it more often directed than at football managers. In recent years, there have been Arsenal fans demanding Wenger is sacked, Man U fans saying Fergie must go - so it should not be a surprise that after a fairly catastrophic opening to a season that held high hopes, there are Liverpool followers insisting that the answer is to sack Rafael Benitez.

'Catastrophic' is a pretty hysterical word in itself, but it's hard to argue that 5 defeats in 11 league games and 4 points from as many CL games amount to that. Equally, Liverpool's injury list could be described in the same way. Any team would struggle if they suddenly lost Gerrard and Torres, if you throw in Johnson, Aquilani, Agger, Skrtel, and Riera, and the occasional loss of Mascherano and Aurelio, they would probably perform as spasmodically as Liverpool have. Sure, the thinness of the squad has been exposed by the injuries, but the thinness of the squad is due in large part to Benitez having had an annual budget of about £15m since inheriting an average squad. This has meant that some of those he would have liked to keep - Crouch, Bellamy, Garcia, etc. - have had to be sold. When he sold Alonso in the summer after selling Keane in January, we waited for the spending splurge - instead, Liverpool made a profit on transfers this summer because the owners have debts to pay, leaving the squad looking dangerously threadbare.

I am not going to defend everything about Rafa's reign. He can be contrary and stubborn, some of his rotations and selections (Voronin on Wednesday - or just Voronin in general) are hard to fathom and he has allowed himself to be influenced too much by the media cicus around the Premier League, inclding demeaning himself by stooping to the level of Fergie's tired 'mind games'. His record on signings is largely good - Torres, Reina, Mascherano, Alonso, Garcia, Skrtel, Agger, Crouch, Bellamy, Johnson, Arebloa, Aurelio, Insua, Kuyt, the highly promising Aquilani...and the flops have mostly been bargains or cheap gambles. There have been a few cases where he has failed to get the best from evidently decent players - Babel (consistently), Keane, Pennant - but the same could be said of other managers as well. But overall, his record in the transfer market is decent and he has vastly improved on what he inherited.

He's also building for the long term, overhauling the Academy, scouring the globe Wenger-style for decent young players and trying to instil some of the old Liverpool mentality - a club that is well run from top to bottom. In this he is enormously hampered by the clowns who currently own the club, but he is trying hard to get the footballing side right. Tactically, he still has few equals - though Liverpool have often been in the disappointing position this season of losing games where they have won the tactical battle. This has been due in part to key absences, but also loss of form from key individuals at various times - Carragher and Mascherano included. As a team, Liverpool have defended less well this season and their options when Torres is out up front are limited to say the least. But as the CL in previous years and the Man U game this year have shown, Benitez is a very clever coach.

So, the argument goes - he's had 5 years, spent lots of money and all he has to show is a dramatic CL win with his inherited team, a slightly fortunate FA Cup win, a decent CL record (until now) and a second place finish that has not been built on this season. Sack him. Get Mourinho or O'Neill or some other manager whose team won this week.

It's emphatically not the answer.

First, it's not the answer because of what the immediate consequences would be. Big names would very probably walk - Torres, Mascherano and Reina are all on record saying Rafa was a major factor in them joining Liverpool - imagine the risk of him moving elsewhere in Europe and coming in for them, or others seeing a club in turmoil and debt and throwing cash at the owners and unsettled players. And paying off Benitez would leave virtually no transfer budget for a new manager - why would anyone approaching Rafa's calibre and track record want to take the job under those cicumstances?

Second, Liverpool would be back to the drawing board. New manager, new players, still competing with clubs with bigger budgets and bigger squads - it would be maybe 3 years before a manager could be judged, and what if that judgement was that he, too, had failed? Liverpool could be heading the way of Leeds, hiring and firing managers, selling players to stay afloat, on a downward spiral that they may never recover from. And what would be success? Maintaining top 4 finishes against the odds? Challenging for the title? Winning the title? The same voices now whining on their blogs and phonne-ins about Benitez would soon be doing the same every time the club had a bad result. Benitez has started a project for the long term - we have invested in him and now we have to let him see it through.

Third, the point I made above - perspective. Benitez has a better record in his first 200 games than Paisley, Shankly, Wenger or Ferguson. It took Fergie 8 years to win his first title and Shankly once went 5 years without winning anything. Both made mistakes during those periods, but their clubs were sensible enough to think about long term progress and stability. It's no use saying "managers don't get the time anymore". That's not good enough. History suggests that good managers who are given time will deliver. Benitez's track record is that of a very good and at times brilliant manager - a man who won two La Liga titles with Valencia, which was almost like winning the Prem with Spurs and who led an average group of players to the most astonishing CL triumph in history. Seriously, guys - get some perspective. Delivering sustained success takes a long time, as Ferguson and Shankly have shown.

Sacking Rafael Benitez would remove the last bit of stability at a club that has been run by cowboys over the last few years. It'd please the knee jerkers (and the many fans of Man United, Everton et al who curiously seem to want Benitez to go - interesting, that) but it would not transform Liverpool's fortunes - that'd take a whole new rebuilding project in an unstable, unsupportive environment (led by people who wanted to hire Jurgen Klinsmann at one point - so heaven knows who would be running the show).

Sack Rafa and you abandon the progress that has been made and go back to the start. Some will favour doing that, I think it would be a ludicrous over-reaction to a poor period generated largely by an injury crisis. Sure, Xabi Alonso is also missed but he wanted to leave and his replacement has so far played 15 minutes - which were highly impressive.

Liverpool's strongest team, when everyone is fit, is a match for anyone. There is a lack of depth and this is due to funds - the need to sell before buying, the relatively paltry annual budget. But it takes several years to turn around a club like Liverpool, especially when you are competing with teams with bigger budgets who are already ahead of you. It takes time, it takes patience, it takes not being knocked off course by a few bad results.  Liverpool FC once embodied those values and were the example for others to follow. It's a shame to see people who call themselves Liverpool supporters abandoning that heritage in search of a quick fix.