Even Houllier could claim to have lived in Liverpool and stood on the Kop to watch Shankly’s teams.In the words of Stephen Kelly, the foremost historian of Liverpool football, Benitez’s appointment is “the final break with the boot-room. This may explain why his relationship with the board that appointed him was always abrasive, despite the damburst of silverware Benitez delivered to the Mestalla.He claimed the board was reluctant both to renew his contract and throughout to back him with serious money. Like Mourinho, as a boy Benitez was fascinated by the minutiae of the sport. He used to write the line-ups and qualifications of all the players in La Liga in a notebook his father gave him and was a fully-qualified coach three years before he gave up playing at the age of 32.The turning point in his career was a sabbatical he took after his club, Extremadura, were relegated in 1999, some of which he spent at Arsenal’s training ground, London Colney, observing Wenger’s coaching techniques. These days the notebooks have been replaced by computer software.The most often-quoted statistic about the man is that he has won a title with his previous three clubs in each of his first seasons with them It is not quite the whole story.

The titles he won with Extremadura and Real Mallorca were promotions to La Liga, and the first was followed by a relegation. Like Jose Mourinho, Ars? Wenger and Houllier, he never played football to any significant level, but he has an almost obsessive, scientific interest in the game. However, it gave the impression that the new man could deliver.Benitez is the very model of a modern Premiership manager. Tonight, in the Arnold Schwarzenegger Stadium, a name that symbolises heroic optimism, Rafael Benitez is expected to deliver on that buoyancy in what appears a straightforward Champions’ League qualifier against Grazer AK.

However, as Newcastle discovered to the cost of £15m when losing on penalties to Partizan Belgrade last season, nothing at this stage of the season is entirely straightforward.No victory Benitez achieves in his first year at Liverpool will be as significant as persuading Steven Gerrard to spurn Chelsea. G?rd Houllier was not sacked because he had lost the Kop; their affection was probably recoverable. He went because he had lost the dressing-room and nobody was more disaffected than Liverpool’s captain, a man, whom ironically, Houllier had nurtured paternalistically.The journey Benitez made to Lisbon to talk to Gerrard face-to-face during the European Championship was not as significant as the conversations Gerrard had with his family. “Obsessive optimistic” was one of the phrases Roger McGough, the Merseyside poet, used to describe Liverpool in a work commissioned to celebrate the city.
Liverpool in August is an obsessed and optimistic place.

That was a point of moral breakdown which demanded, more than anything in the often sad and misguided history of the FA, outside intervention.Now, in the loathsomely prurient aftermath of an affair which over the weekend occupied acres of space in two Sunday newspapers – and for what but a tedious recital of what sounded like pretty sub-Casanovan sex? – that imperative of reform should only intensify The horror is that only a few faces will change.. At a vital phase in the development of France’s superb sports infrastructure, the sports minister was Guy Drut, an Olympic hurdling champion. What he is saying is vitally important – and sadly rare in the analysis of what has been happening in the Soho Square offices of the FA. It should have been the universal reaction to the sickening news that key figures in the national game had gone to the News of the World offering Eriksson’s expensive head on a platter in exchange for the neck of chief executive Mark Palios. He did, after all, come to the game as a refugee from some scandals of his own in government, but that is not the point. Who does the FA offer by way of leadership and charisma? Thompson, Richards, men for whom mere mediocrity is a goal rather than a failure.It is maybe a little ironic that Mellor is now such a strong and cogent voice on behalf of football reform.