Posts Tagged ‘Fiorentina’

Rafa hits back at Souness

Benítez assured his job is safe despite Champions League flop

• Liverpool’s managing director, Christian Purslow, backs Benítez
• Club now targeting Europa League consolation prize

Rafael Benítez has been assured his position as Liverpool manager will not be undermined by Champions League failure as he admitted the 2005 winners and 2007 runners-up had only themselves to blame for a damaging group-stage exit. The unequivocal support arrived from the Liverpool managing director, Christian Purslow, who insisted the Anfield club could withstand the financial impact of their early elimination.

David Ngog’s fourth-minute goal gave Liverpool victory over Debrecen but a first win in six matches was rendered irrelevant by Fiorentina’s defeat of Lyon. The result in Tuscany ensured Fiorentina progressed at Liverpool’s expense, and prompted Purslow to issue firm backing for Benítez before his future at the club could come under scrutiny again.

“This will have no bearing on Rafa whatsoever,” Purslow said. “He signed a new five-year deal four months ago and in those terms he is four months into a five-year journey. You don’t deviate from long‑term plans for people and the way to take the club to the next level because of two late goals against Lyon, and that’s what it boils down to.”

Purslow is currently searching for new investors willing to meet Tom Hicks’s and George Gillett’s asking price of £100m for a 25% stake in Liverpool. While that process may be complicated by demotion to the Europa League, Liverpool are expected to suffer a budgetary shortfall of only £2.4m for this season as a consequence of their group exit.

“We budget for a level of performance that maybe fans would not like to be at, it’s prudent,” the managing director added. “If we have three home games in the Europa League we are equivalent to what we budget for in the Champions League.

“We are very disappointed but we could have played one home leg, one away leg and been out. I like to think we’ll be taking 40 or 50,000 fans to Hamburg in May and if we get halfway to doing that we will make more money than we would from one round in the Champions League. It is a missed opportunity financially but it has no effect on budgeted performance, and that’s the key thing. Budget prudently and then you don’t get negative surprises if football doesn’t go the right way.”

Purslow’s guarantee was the only tangible consolation in Hungary for Benítez, who now travels to Merseyside rivals Everton on Sunday with qualification for next season’s Champions League an absolute priority. The Liverpool manager, whose players gathered around a screen to watch the closing minutes from Florence, pinned the blame on his team’s exit on Lyon’s stoppage-time winner at Anfield, their 90th minute equaliser at Stade Gerland plus a poor first-half display in Italy.

The Liverpool manager said: “You have to be disappointed. We knew we had to win and we did. We can’t change what happened in the other match, but at least we did our job. If you look at the games, two late goals made a massive difference. We were not any worse in them than others but we paid for the two late goals against Lyon. It’s part of football but it’s difficult to control.

“We made mistakes in those games in the last minute, so it’s our fault in the end. I’m really disappointed because we had chances in all games and could have won them all.”

Benítez also claimed Liverpool’s previous success in the Champions League had clouded analysis of this season’s struggles in the group. “We have been so good in the last years that people think it is easy to go through in this competition. They think it has to be every year. We could have done it but have to be positive now. Now we have a massive game on Sunday and we have to be ready for it.

“It really hurts, especially in the way we went out. We’re in a very bad position and can’t win the Champions League now so we will just have to do our best in the next game. A lot of teams don’t even reach the Champions League. Because we have qualified for five years in a row people think it’s easy, but it’s not.”

Steven Gerrard, the Liverpool captain, admitted the task of winning the inaugural Europa League in Hamburg next May represented a dispiriting consolation. “The main prize has gone and to be playing in the Europa League is disappointing but we have to accept that, move on and try to win that competition,” he said. “The only consolation in this is if we go on and win the secondary one.”

Aquilani still weeks from Liverpool bow

• Italian midfielder likely to miss visit of Manchester United
• Benítez likely to be given £12m budget in January

Alberto Aquilani is unlikely to be fit for the critical week Liverpool face after the international break despite Rafael Benítez issuing an upbeat assessment of the midfielder’s recovery from ankle surgery.

Aquilani has not appeared for Liverpool since arriving from Roma in August as a replacement for Xabi Alonso, having undergone an operation on his right ankle in May. The importance of the £20m attacking midfielder has been highlighted in successive defeats away at Fiorentina in the Champions League and at Chelsea on Sunday, when Benítez’s team suffered their third league reverse of the season.

Liverpool enter “a massive week”, in the words of Jamie Carragher, after this latest round of international fixtures, comprising a game at Sunderland, a Champions League tie with the Group E leaders, Lyon, and the visit of Manchester United to Anfield on 25 October. The optimistic two-week wait for Aquilani’s debut would see the Italy international return against Lyon but he is more likely to play at Arsenal in the Carling Cup on 28 October or at Fulham the following Saturday.

Despite that schedule and Benítez’s admission that he expects Aquilani to be available in “two to three weeks”, the Spaniard will not force the 25-year-old’s return to competitive action, already more than six months after his last competitive game. “I have been speaking to the doctors and things are going well with him,” the Liverpool manager said. “Alberto is progressing all the time. It could be two to three weeks before he is back. But we need to use caution.

“If it is two weeks everyone will say ‘that is fantastic’ but if it is three, everyone will say it is not a problem. We will take it one step at a time and we have the international break to look forward to now. That will be good for him, as he will have some more time.”

Benítez added: “He is running and swimming – I think he will have the record in the swimming pool by the end of his programme – and he is working in the gym. He is doing almost everything and he is doing some things with the team. The only thing he is not doing is kicking a ball, not yet anyway.”

The Liverpool manager must also contend with his Argentinian players Javier Mascherano and Emiliano Insúa returning from international duty in South America just days before Liverpool face Sunderland, as Argentina play Peru and Uruguay in the next week. The Brazilian Lucas Leiva will also make the trip home as he is included in the squad that faces Bolivia and Venezuela between Sunday and Wednesday.

That means all three players will have little time to recover from their travels before Liverpool head for their vital Premier League fixture at the Stadium of Light on Saturday week.

Reports last night suggested that, despite the failure of Aquilani, Liverpool’s most significant purchase of the summer, to justify his fee so far, Benítez has been allocated a £12m budget for the January transfer window. Lazio’s Macedonian striker Goran Pandev is thought to be among his possible targets.

Frank Lampard rejects talk of Chelsea crisis

• ‘We have to improve for Sunday, it’s a big game,’ says Lampard
• Carlo Ancelotti and players know this is a work in progress

Frank Lampard has rejected suggestions that Chelsea’s form may be floundering in the build-up to Liverpool’s visit to Stamford Bridge but said the club must learn from their toils against Wigan and Apoel Nicosia over the last seven days if they are to win on Sunday.

Both games prompted angry dressing-room inquests, instigated by the players at the DW Stadium and, more notably, by Carlo Ancelotti in Cyprus, as they attempt to regain the momentum of the opening weeks of the campaign. Yet Lampard pointed to an impressive record to date this season – Ancelotti has overseen nine victories from 10 competitive matches in charge – as evidence that this is hardly a club in crisis.

“We’ve only lost one game all season,” said the England midfielder after the 1-0 Champions League win in Nicosia. “I don’t know what people mean by ‘not clicking’. What, all season? Look, we lost against Wigan at the weekend and didn’t play well at all. But we went to Cyprus, not an easy game, and won. So, it has clicked this season. We’ve been flying all season. You’re never going to get a season when you’re flying every match and, when things don’t go quite as well, you have to win games anyway. We did that.

“Our performance against Apoel wasn’t great. In the first half we were in control of the game. Maybe we could have been a bit more forceful in the final third but we controlled the game. Second half, to be fair to them, they came out and gave us a tough game, really. We didn’t play our best but we got through, got the three points and we go home. We have to improve for Sunday, of course. It’s a big game. But Liverpool lost in Fiorentina, so they’ll be trying to improve as well.”

Liverpool achieved a league double over Chelsea last season – the London club taking solace by triumphing in the Champions League quarter-finals – with the 1-0 win inflicted at Stamford Bridge at the end of October ending an 86-match unbeaten run that bridged four managers. More significantly Xabi Alonso’s deflected winning goal subjected Luiz Felipe Scolari to his first defeat as Chelsea’s manager and, while the team initially appeared to recover, their aura of invincibility never returned.

There have been flashes of good fortune under Ancelotti – there were last-minute winners against Hull and Stoke in the league, albeit after contests Chelsea had dominated – but both the manager and his players are aware that theirs is a work still in progress. The Italian is still implementing his tactical approach and game plan and, while the team has generally adapted well, he has made his dissatisfaction obvious in the last week.

Lampard conceded lessons must be learned swiftly from the first two poor performances of the manager’s reign. “It was disappointing in Nicosia because we didn’t play as well as we know we can,” he said. “The manager said it was a good result. There were a few things that he wasn’t too happy about with the performance. I think that was pretty obvious, particularly the second half, and he said there were things we had to improve on. I think we all knew that anyway. We wanted to push on from the first half, really, and play as we had done but with a little bit more urgency. But we ended up giving the ball away quite a lot and inviting a bit of pressure.

“Things went a bit awry. We weren’t keeping the ball well enough or keeping our shape well enough. It was probably our fault that we didn’t keep the ball as well and play a bit more forcefully second half. We need to learn from that.

“But look at the results in Europe this week, for Liverpool and Milan. That just shows that games like the one at Apoel are never easy. And if you invite opponents on to you, give them a little bit of a leg upas we did, they become even more difficult. These teams are here on merit. They’re very organised. We’re just pleased we came away with a result. Winning was a bonus. All we’ve got to do is take the positives out of it and put the little things right that went wrong in the second half.”

Football Weekly – inside the pod

Barry Glendenning, John Ashdown and James Dart join TV’s James Richardson in the Football Weekly pod this week – and it’s a good job they scrubbed up so well, because we filmed the whole thing (although luckily for you, dear listener, you’ll only see a director’s cut of our experiment with making middle-aged men, microphones, and a coffee-stained table visually stimulating).

Anyway, the pod squad look back on a bonanza in the Premier League, with goals galore from Fernando Torres, Robbie Keane, and, er, Wigan as they defeated Chelsea. Why are there so many high-scoring games this season?

Also in the show, the team bring us up to speed with the lower-league shenanigans, including how Newcastle heaped more misery on Roy Keane’s Ipswich, and how Sol Campbell probably never was going to line up next to Roberto Carlos at Notts County, despite what he claimed he’d been promised.

Finally, Paolo Bandini pops in to talk about the Italian leagues and preview Liverpool’s Champions League clash with Fiorentina, while Sid Lowe fills us in on Xerez’s first point in La Liga, another goal for Ibrahimovic at Barceona, and another strop for Ronaldo at Real Madrid.

Don’t miss a kick by subscribing to us on iTunes, and following us on Facebook, or on Twitter via Guardian Sport, Barry Glendenning and Sean Ingle.