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This was his decidedly private aide memoire, a kind of Road Map to progress, containing notes of his planned exhortations to his players during the three main intervals. I needed to select the right words, and that is difficult when I have players who speak different languages."He provides, with smiling self-depracation, an example of the problem, recalling the moment when he was first at the club and saw a player in a training session about to take a free-kick "I said to him 'Be careful with the wine'. "Then walking to the changing room I was thinking about what to say and how to say it. Not only has Benitez fashioned a Champions' League-winning side from one who have been injury-stricken and, many would suggest, deficient in the overall class that the leading clubs in Europe boast, but he has done so handicapped by tenuous communication processes.Listen to the Spaniard, and life at Mellwood training ground sounds more suited to Mind Your Language (for the uninitiated, a feeble old TV sitcom which essentially ridiculed foreigners' misuse of English) than providing material for Match Of The Day."Five minutes before half-time, I was thinking about tactics and making changes," he explains. Had he done so, it would have confirmed to him that, but for his own half-time intervention with the introduction of Dietmar Hamann, and that of goalkeeper Jerzy Dudek, who twice thwarted Andrei Shevchenko at the conclusion of extra time, most of the media may have been present to dissect the body Liverpool and his management of it, not to glorify them. As the exodus began, and the fez-clad Liverpool followers - looking more like Tommy Cooper than Tommy Smith - ceased their raucous occupancy of Istanbul on Thursday morning, Rafael Benitez sat in the team hotel and attempted to explain the previous 12 hours. You sensed he wasn't entirely certain he should be revealing such a document to a bunch of cynical journalists, and when he was asked for a copy so that it could be reproduced for the benefit of readers of this newspaper, he politely declined.You cannot blame him.
He probably hadn't noticed that elsewhere in that residency, delegates were just arriving for The 23rd World Congress of Pathology. Surely, it cannot be beyond even Uefa to schedule a possible replay.. And yet, whatever pleasure one feels for the remarkable and, one must say, very engaging Benitez, the manner of victory diminished his team's achievement.Such a finale should not be settled from the penalty spot The match is drawn. After a season's games, involving umpteen teams, the watching public and both sides are deserving of more than this.
Even in the shoot-out the penalty-taking from players of suchquality was atrocious, particularly in contrast to Liverpool's who, John Arne Riise apart, were as efficient as Wyatt Earp's men at the OK Corral. We all admired Liverpool's gutsy rearguard action in extra time, with Jamie Carrager, Sami Hyypia and Steven Gerrard magnificent amid the injuries and fatigue, but the most significant remark afterwards came from the Liverpool captain: "We were playing for penalties if I'm honest."It has to be conceded that Liverpool were there for the taking Milan failed to seize the moment. It is principally because of the inability of Benitez's team to translate this season's European form into domestic results History has little sympathy for defeated finalists. It weeps no more liberally for them if they are the moral victors. Twice in five days, finals have been decided by penalty shoot-outs. By any consensus beyond Highbury and Anfield, the least deserving team over the previous 120 minutes won; but then who, in years to come, will remember that Manchester United and Milan contested the FA Cup and Champions' League finals in 2005?The vagaries of this wonderful game will always conspire to produce such outcomes.
