. New Real Madrid manager Rafael Benitez says he wants Real Madrid to win every game they play in and has wowed to improve their defense in order to achieve that.
“I want us to be a team that go out to win every game,” Benitez told the club’s official website.
“A team that take the initiative, are assertive, that attack as well as in recent years and that defend a little bit better, to achieve that balance that will enable us to win more games and have a greater chance of winning trophies.”
This statement by Benitez not only implies that the manager is determined to win every game with Real Madrid, the perfectionist that Rafa is, he wants to continue to improve Real and has identified the area which does seems a bit of a problem area for them in recent times – defense.
Sid Lowe, in his article on Rafa back in 2009, beautifully illustrates this obsession with correcting mistake.
“But Ben tez had always been a coach, even when he was a player. His father still has the notebook Rafa kept when he was 13, full of notes on his team-mates, marks out of 10, tactics, even his team talks. He was a compulsive collector of cuttings and no one could shut him up. “When I played, they said I talked too much but I couldn’t help it,” Ben tez admits. “If I saw a problem I tried to correct it.”
Real Madrid have not won the league for three seasons, now, and failure to win any trophy led to the departure of Carlo Ancelotti.
A major reason for failure in winning the league has been the defense which has conceded 42, 38, 38 goals in those three season, with La Liga having won by teams who have conceded the least goal in the last two seasons and the second least the season before.
There were concerns with the appointment of Benitez, that he will not be able to match the winning ambition that a club like Real Madrid had, given that he had never won the league with Liverpool FC and his last major success was winning the Champion’s League with Liverpool FC in 2005.
However, one can also understand that he never really had a squad to win leagues since his departure from Liverpool FC, where he did come very, very close despite competing on a much lower budget to Roman Abramovic financed Chelsea FC and the power house that Sir Alex Ferguson and his Manchester United side were.
At Real Madrid, things are different. And as he has shown before at Valencia, he understands winning in the Spanish league better than he understands it in any other league.
