Benitez must learn to improvise to avoid predictable ending
Sunday’s clash between Cardiff and Burnley might bring about the earliest ever conclusion to a relegation battle. We are just an away draw or win from there being three teams yet to win a game with over 18% of the season played. Last season, there were no relegation spots to be settled going into the final day; and yet by this stage last year, everyone but Crystal Palace had won at least once.
Burnley are not immune from being sucked into this little group of clearly-inferior sides, particularly if they should lose at Cardiff; but in the current bottom three, we have the perfect trifecta of relegation candidate, all doomed in different ways.
You have the shambolically-run club beset with problems in the boardroom, this year being played by Newcastle United, repeating their star turns in the same role in 2009 and 2016. Then there’s the team suffering second-season syndrome having miraculously hung on to their place last year: Huddersfield Town, take a bow. And finally, there’s the newly-promoted side with the very Championship squad and extremely Championship manager: introducing to the stage, Cardiff City!
These are three different clubs with very different issues, but all are practically impossible to solve in the short term. Huddersfield and Cardiff are more forgivable, bearing hallmarks not of mismanagement by the board but of two relatively small clubs who are just not quite cut out for this level yet.
That Cardiff have surprised a few people without actually having won a game is a testament to how low the expectations were of the Bluebirds, and it is no easier to envisage them avoiding the drop. Huddersfield, meanwhile, overachieved hugely for two seasons to even be present in the Premier League this season; sorry, Winty, but it couldn’t last forever.
If only Newcastle could say the same: their problems already seem to have been around for eternity. They are the fat, balding, money-grubbing businessghost at the Premier League banquet, wandering aimlessly around the table and pointlessly gorging as much as they can before they’re inevitably forced to leave. That they could actually enjoy much more delicious fare for years to come if only they would pull themselves together and behave well enough to stay seems not to occur to those in charge.
Chelsea and Manchester United fans aside, you would struggle to find anyone who didn’t feel sorry for Rafael Benitez, who makes a more and more convincing Willy Loman for every week he stays at Newcastle, clinging desperately to the promise of a change that will never come – even as he himself wearily comes to realises it, as everyone else had done for years. Benitez surely can’t stay around for too much longer under such conditions: it’s incredible that he has stayed even until now.
But that doesn’t mean he is entirely blameless. Playing the Benitez way is understandable against bigger teams: such a style has brought 2-1 defeats to Tottenham, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City this season, any of which could have been converted into a point or three with more luck or concentration.
But in the absence of ability, Benitez must get Newcastle playing more adventurously against the Premier League’s rest. Better, surely, to go for the odd chaotic 3-2 than to try and stay tight and organised and end up drawing 0-0 against the likes of Cardiff and Crystal Palace, or losing 2-0 to Leicester.
Benitez has so far refused to budge from his disciplined and conservative nature, but the current evidence is that it’s holding Newcastle back. Benitez is the Michelin-starred chef who has gone onto Ready Steady Cook with a specific plan and opted to follow through with it despite getting none of the ingredients he had hoped for.
This stubbornness has always been Benitez’s Achilles heel – his insistence on doing things entirely his way did not go down well at Inter Milan, Chelsea or Real Madrid – but now more than ever, he must learn to improvise better. If not Newcastle will continue the season following an all-too-familiar script.
Steven Chicken