【原文地址】Click Here
【原文标题】Rafael Benítez anxious to avoid vertigo
【预计奖金】400fmb
【文章内容】
Oliver Kay
The view from the summit is always inspiring, but, for Rafael Benítez, the challenge is to ensure that the rarefied air does not cause a loss of nerve. There are pitfalls aplenty when your team are in front, so the Liverpool manager has given warning of the danger of taking any false steps on the trek that lies ahead in the Barclays Premier League title race.
Holding court at Liverpool’s training ground before this evening’s home game against Portsmouth, Benítez suggested that his team would have to be “almost perfect” over the next seven months to become champions for the first time since 1990.
Asked what he meant by “almost perfect”, he replied that the title-winning standard in the Premier League is higher than in any of Europe’s other top leagues, including that in his native Spain. Such will be the challenge from Manchester United, Chelsea and Arsenal, he said, that there can be no let-up from Liverpool after their sure-footed start to the campaign.
“To win the Premier League is really difficult,” Benítez said. “You can talk about maybe needing 95 points, which Chelsea got one year [2004-05], or 87 points [United’s title-winning total last season], and you cannot lose too many games if you want to reach that kind of total. That is the reason why it is more difficult. It is harder to win than La Liga. Chelsea, United and Arsenal will not lose many games. Always you can say that one of them can make mistakes, but all three at the same time? It is difficult.”
Benítez acknowledged that his Liverpool team, who will again be bereft of the injured Fernando Torres this evening, will have to emulate his Valencia team that won the Spanish title in 2003-04. That formidable side, built on the same foundations of tactical discipline and a strong defence, were known in Spain — perhaps a little disparagingly by sections of the Madrid and Catalan media — as “the machine”, but they lost seven out of 38 matches that season, ending with 77 points, which is only one more than Liverpool gained in finishing a distant fourth behind United, Chelsea and Arsenal last term. That might suggest that the Premier League is less competitive than the Spanish league, but it also indicates that, when it comes to winning the league, the margin for error in England is terrifyingly small.
By beating United and Chelsea recently — without the injured Torres on both occasions — Liverpool have shown that they have overcome their mental block when playing the biggest teams, which is why Benítez smirked yesterday when it was put to him that the real test now was how his team perform against the league’s lesser lights. “It’s funny because before the Chelsea game, I was reading the newspapers and people were saying: ‘Liverpool must win against the top sides,’ ” he said. “Now it is: ‘Maybe you will lose against the smaller teams.’ But that is football. We have to concentrate on each game.”
The next two, against Portsmouth and away to Tottenham Hotspur on Saturday, will mean facing opponents under new management, which, so the theory goes, will make life harder for Liverpool. Benítez, though, is concerned only that his team continue to get results. Having wrestled their way to the top, Liverpool’s ambition is to stay there, emboldened, Benítez hopes, by the knowledge that a couple of false steps could prove fatal. |
发表于 2008-10-29 09:27:28
显身卡
发表于 2008-10-29 13:21:00
