Right, being the determined so an so that I am, I've copied the article below. As I said earlier, make of this what you will...
Inter boss Rafa Benitez may not sugar-coat his words, but dismissing him as a mad ranter is wide of the mark
There's nothing wrong with the odd Spanish proverb
2 Nov 2010 12:20:00
COMMENT
By Amar Singh
He's been out of the English game for just a few months yet Rafa Benitez has continued to make the headlines on these shores with two ripostes at his critics. And, as is often the case with Benitez - his comments are very swiftly dismissed as, 'weird' or 'strange'.
The first was his rebuttal to the claims of Tom Hicks, that it was he, not the debt-accumulating Texan and his estranged co-owner George Gillett who is responsible for the predicament that Liverpool find themselves in.
âWe have a saying in Spanish, which is, âWhite liquid in a bottle has to be milkâ.
'Rant', 'mad' and 'bizarre' were just some of the words used to describe Rafa's comments yet what he said in the context of his answer was really not that hard to understand - that if Hicks and Gillett look like they have done a bad job then that is probably the case.
The latest 'Rafa rant' came this week as Benitez responded to claims by his successor at Liverpool, Roy Hodgson, that he had left him with a squad of expensive failures.
"Every single press conference is worse than the last one. Heâs talking about things he doesnât know. Some people cannot see a priest on a mountain of sugar."
Again this one has been labelled a 'cryptic rant' and the 'tirade to end all tirades'. However is it that hard to ascertain that Benitez is using a proverb to say that perhaps Hodgson can't blame Liverpool's poor start to the season purely on the players he inherited?
Benitez has never been able to draw on much love from the English media.
To understand why the Spaniard has endured as a whipping boy of the press largely due to a strained relationship with the media during his five years at Liverpool.
It is fair to say that Rafa Benitez hardly endeared himself to the media. He lacked the audacious charm of Jose Mourinho, the old school self-assurance of Sir Alex Ferguson or the professorial poise of Arsene Wenger.
Rafa Benitez was the serious and very guarded tactician. In interviews, his stock answers ranged from 'we are focused on the next match' to 'we try to bring quality to the squad'.
He rarely praised his players individually or made impassioned, heartfelt remarks. He was a journalist's nightmare in many ways.
But this mattered little to Liverpool fans as he delivered the Champions League and the FA Cup in his first two seasons and made the Reds one of the most formidable teams in Europe.
The moment he did break from this 'shield up' approach to the media, Rafa made the error of going after the game's untouchable Sir Alex Ferguson in his now infamous 'facts rant' in January 2009.
It was held against him as Liverpool lost ground in the title race and subsequently every thing that Rafa says in his defence is often tagged as a 'rant'.
This coupled with a colloquialism that may not make immediate sense gets tagged as a 'cryptic' or 'weird' rant.
Yet English football managers use proverbs and cliches all the time.
When Sir Alex Ferguson uses the metaphor of two cows in a field to explain his thoughts on why Wayne Rooney had decided to questions the club's ambition is it dismissed as a 'bizarre tirade' or 'rant'?
Football managers can also, quite literally, rant.
We have seen it this season from Ian Holloway, who seems to be celebrated for his ranting and yes even the 'genial' Roy Hodgson can lose control from time to time.
When he ended a press conference by dodging a question on Fernando Torres and telling the Norwegian journalist who asked it that he never wanted to work in either Norway or Denmark again before walking out, it went down like a lead balloon with the club's sizeable Scandinavian fan base. But this went unreported by the UK media.
Has Hodgson benefited from being one of the few English managers at a big Premier League club?
For the fans of Liverpool Rafa Benitez was always going to be a tough act to follow despite the travails of last season.
But for the media, Roy Hodgson was deemed a breath of fresh air with his 'frank and chatty' style in the press conferences - which made for lively articles - until the results started going against him.
This is not a defence of Rafa Benitez and every decision he ever made at Liverpool. There were many poor signings along the way and an inability to hold on to good squad players in particular which ultimately cost him.
When he left Anfield in the summer few Liverpool supporters howled in protest.
But as with so many issues in football there can be no single answer. Liverpool's decline began under Rafa and has plumbed new depths under Hodgson - all against the backdrop of one of the most disastrous stewardships of a club in modern day football.
Thankfully Hicks and Gillett have gone and whatever your view is on Hodgson or Benitez and their relative merits or failings, both would do well to keep their own counsel now on who is to blame for Liverpool's descent into relative mediocrity.
Liverpool, a club once known for keeping all business in-house and appointing managers from within its vaunted boot room, has emerged from a period in which all its dirty laundry has been hung out in public.
Feuding owners, high court battles, Texan injunctions and now missives aimed at each other by Benitez and Hodgson are about as compatible with the club that Bill Shankly built as leveraged debt is popular with supporters.
Nevertheless, dismissing Rafa Benitez as a mad ranter simply because he may use the odd Spanish colloquialism to make his point says more about our insularity than it does about his state of mind.
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