Chelsea FC – The Genius Of Rafa Benitez (Satire)

By Ed Fernandez
11 years Ago

Rafa Benitez has managed to achieve the impossible. He’s managed to get Chelsea fans really excited about the club’s current position, 10 points behind the league leaders halfway into the season.

Chelsea’s fans are a notoriously petulant lot; they were terribly displeased when their side lost the title to United on the final day of the 2007-08 season of the Barclays Premier League by just 2 points. Six years later, to get them to accept even his mere presence at Stamford Bridge is a masterstroke of PR genius.

In a league that has ceased to shock people any more, due credit must be given to Roman Abramovich for his final, ingenious bid to get our jaws to collectively hit the floor in unison. Making our heads spin in incredulity by announcing Sir Alex Ferguson as Chelsea’s next coach, wouldn’t quite cut it. So Roman went for the polar opposite, by single-handedly resurrecting the career of a man so radioactively toxic that the Iranian nuclear program designed their logo after him.

Where Hitler’s and Napoleon’s armies had failed, desperately trying to breach the icy defenses of the Russian Empire, Rafa Benitez has inexplicably succeeded. Not only did he not chase success or even choose to ignore it, he worked incredibly hard to avoid success at all cost. And yet, under the cover of a darkness, he achieved it. Rafa Benitez has become the world’s newest self-help guru, as copies of his autobiography fly off the sheves at bookstores. Eager readers hang on to every word in a bid to crack the mystery of the Spaniard’s ability to conjure up employment for himself at will, in a world seemingly resigned to sluggish economic growth and record unemployment.

When Chelsea’s managers asked what it was they could do better to keep their jobs, Rafa Benitez went the other way. He asked about precisely what it was he could do worse at, that would get him the coveted seat at The Bridge. It’s this legendary out-of-the-box thinking that got Liverpool out of the top 4.

But as it turns out, Roman only needed proof that Benitez was capable of wrecking even paradise. So Rafa Benitez went to Inter Milan, a club that had just won an Italian triple, something never before achieved in the club or in Italian football’s history. The team had stood shoulder to shoulder, fought hand to hand, and bled for the cause until the grass turned Black and Blue.

Then Rafa turned up at the San Siro, cleaning his spectacles with the Liverpool flag – a trophy from the last club he’d smoked into oblivion. His predecessor at the Italian club, was Jose Mourinho – a great communicator. So Rafa Benitez, self-anointed messiah from Bizarro World, realized it was time to introduce his own style of communication: not speaking a word. Rafa, instead, devised a series of hand gestures so intricate and complex that most people suspected he was making it up as he went along.

Occasionally the gestures made sense as he, like an orchestra conductor, urged his team forward to find an elusive goal. But most of the times, Benitez was content with making sure nobody understood what he wanted to convey. After his side scored a goal, Benitez would often slap his forehead in exasperation and throw his hands up in the air.

He would then proceed to point with both his index fingers in opposite directions and twirl them mid-air. As his confused players looked on, the other team would invariably score. Upon which Rafa Benitez would begin to gesture animatedly yet again, in what could only be described as a desperate bid to get the rain gods to shower the earth with precipitation.

In two months, he’d managed to get the defending champions of Europe to within a point of relegation. While Mourinho had taken two years and millions of euros to reach the top, Rafa needed just a fraction of that to send Inter Milan back to the stone age. It takes a big personality to turn Maicon and Zanetti into school kids, and Abramovich had seen enough to know this was the man to sap every bit of fight in Chelsea’s player power-obsessed dressing room.

If di Matteo coddled his players in a bid to massage their egos just so he could win games, Benitez would prove that he could drain the very source of locker room power with a terrifying secret. Rafa Benitez didn’t care about winning games. Once it became evident he didn’t care a fig’s leaf about ensuring a Chelsea victory, players were less likely to blackmail him with the threat of sub-standard performances.

As Chelsea’s squad began to throw one game after another, Benitez stared on intently daring them to make him blink first. In the end, Chelsea’s players blinked. They cared too much about results to continue to fight Benitez who was anyway impervious to the embarrassment of going entire months without victories.

Rafa Benitez also managed to find his advance scout Fernando Torres another excuse. Torres who had earlier complained nobody was passing the ball to him, was now instructed to tell everyone how the current side passed the ball a little too much to him for his liking. Chelsea’s midfielders were in a bind wondering what needed to be done, until Rafa announced the biggest change in Chelsea’s style of play in the final third.

He promised a new “direct” style that would get the best out of Torres, and proceeded to put out the same formation and players that Chelsea had always used. Nobody noticed.

And therein lies Benitez’ greatest weapon, the ability to elicit mass apathy. For all the threats made by Chelsea fans on marching out of the stadium never to return, they’ve come back to watch Benitez in action every time. They know deep in their hearts none of his plans are likely to work or even make the least bit of sense, but like willing subjects under hypnosis they continue to want to believe in Benitez. They want to believe he’ll find a way to convince the world’s best sides to implode on the field at the Club World Cup. In all probability, he won’t.

But if Benitez’s past is anything to go by, failure means nothing to him. Unfortunately, neither does success.

Categories: Chelsea FC, Columns, COVER STORY, English Premier League
Tags: Chelsea FC Rafael Benitez

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