Quiet man helps the Reds roar again

If it was Jose Mourinho, his adversary at Stamford Bridge tonight, you could understand it - handsome, melodramatic, brash, a serial winner.

Yet a polite, unflashy Spaniard with a middle-aged spread and a bank manager's countenance who's overseen 13 league defeats, including some pitiful capitulations like Saturday's at Crystal Palace, and sacrificed FA Cup dreams by fielding a second-string team?

There have certainly been times when Benitez has appeared a most unlikely object of devotion.

What has provided him with an aura down the Anfield Road, though, is the overwhelming sense not just that he's brought back anticipation and excitement with their glorious Champions League ride but also that it seems to mean as much to him as to the supporters that the gloss be restored to one of the world's great clubs after so many shoddy paint jobs.

What was it that Liverpool fans loved most about him, I asked one at the weekend. "It's that he's straight up, doesn't bulls**t, doesn't pretend to be anything he isn't," came the reply. "And he appears to really care."

Here is a Real Madrid fan, the first Liverpool manager in living memory not to have any connection with the club whatsoever - even Gerard Houllier liked to harp on about his Kop watching days when he was teaching in Walton - yet what Benitez lacks in boot room credibility, he's made up for with a genuine eagerness to envelop himself in the Liverpool experience, past and present.

So it was that he'd uprooted his family in Valencia to make their new life on the Wirral. Here, he's spent hours, when not being a workaholic at the Melwood training complex, glued to videos of Anfield's Seventies glory nights, trying to succeed in his "challenge to find, teach and inspire the old Liverpool spirit, the mentality, the philosophy of respect and the original values of football that our club made famous."

His formidable wife, Montserrat - "My special gift" as he describes the doctor of law whom he met while he was running a gym in Madrid in the late Eighties - has been his accomplice, swotting up on Liverpool FC histories during the day and passing the knowledge to him when he returns home whacked.

Benitez, a bit less extrovert, marvels at how Montserrat seems to have got to know everyone at the club. "It's like when she sings the songs with the fans," he said. "She wants us to be part of this club, to be part of the family, for our family to be part of Liverpool." Nowhere would such a relationship be considered so important than at an institution which has long prided itself as the people's club. The connection with the uncomplicated and approachable Benitez has been easier than with his predecessor, the more patrician Houllier. Yet all this 'man of the people' stuff would count for nothing if Benitez's footballing nous wasn't so glaring.

After all, this alchemist had reinvented lost causes such as Igor Biscan and Djimi Traore, liberated chained defenders like Steve Finnan and bought quality in Fernando Morientes, Xabi Alonso and Luis Garcia. Furthermore, although doubts over Steven Gerrard's future have clouded their season, Benitez has proved, with the team performance par excellence at Juventus, that there is life beyond him, that Liverpool's power could again, as of old, lie in the collective not the individual superstar.

On Saturday evening, Benitez seemed as disgruntled as anyone could recall - even while maintaining his civil front - as he bit his tongue about Palace's in-your-face tactics. Still, you couldn't help suspecting his real frustration was aimed at himself for failing again to have found a way of coping with the rough and tumble of Premiership skirmishing in the way he has mastered the Euro chessboard.

Yet few doubt that, sooner or later, he will. As Jamie Carragher noted after the quarter-final victory over Juventus if you can tactically outmanoeuvre the doyen, Fabio Capello, then no challenge is insurmountable.

Benitez's revolution may have been quieter than Mourinho's but the principles have been the same; defensive organisation, counter-attacking fluidity and collective responsibility.

Could Rafa have one more weapon than even the exulted one? For as John Aldridge noted, Anfield has never been so vibrant in its all-seater era than against Juventus three weeks ago. A quiet Spaniard still learning the words to You'll Never Walk Alone did this. When he walked into that pub, it was as if he was stepping straight into their hearts.

Why Benitez and Mourinho are two of a kind

On the face of it, they are as chalk and cheese. In the blue corner, Jose Mourinho, the brash, cocksure, colourful Portuguese who courts controversy and in the red, Rafael Benitez, the quiet, self-effacing Spaniard who could hardly be less outspoken. Yet think again ...

1 Both share the same philosophy, pushing the team concept and having no time for show-off individuals.

2 Both are late starters who were in footballing obscurity as 30-somethings. Mourinho was Bobby Robson's interpreter while Benitez ran a private gym in Madrid.

3 Both left double-winners to pursue new challenges - Benitez after UEFA Cup/La Liga triumphs and Mourinho following his Champions League/ Portuguese league successes.

4 Both trust in a core of compatriots. Benitez has a Spanish Armada of Fernando Morientes, Xabi Alonso, Luis Garcia and Antonio Nunez. Mourinho has a Portuguese trio of Tiago, Paulo Ferreira and Ricardo Carvalho.

5 Both are ambitious, disciplinarian perfectionists who pore over tiniest details.

6 Both had fairly low-key playing careers.