Rafa Benitez never engaged with anyone and I had no relationship with him at Liverpool | OneFootball

Rafa Benitez has a CV that can rival most of the top coaches in Europe but his man-management skills certainly seem to have ruffled the feathers of many former Liverpool players.

Speaking about his experience under the Spaniard, Lee Peltier said on The Football Historian Podcast: “I didn’t really interact with him at all really.

“Obviously when you’re training, he’d stand on the side and shout whatever he needed to shout, or team talks, or whatever.

“But other than that, because I weren’t around it a lot, I was only at training and stuff like that you didn’t really…

“You’d go in and train and you had a guy called Alex [Miller] and Pako [Ayestaran], they were his his men there, they used to do everything.

“[Benitez] was very quiet in terms of standoffish, sort of not really engaging with anyone.

“So, yeah, I didn’t really have any sort of relationship with him.

“But listen, I’m grateful to him for giving me my debut and giving me a chance in in the team.”

This is certainly not an isolated story from players of this era and is an interesting insight to what life at Melwood was like in the early 2000s.

Lee Peltier played all of his Liverpool games under Rafa Benitez

(Photo by Matthew Lewis/Getty Images)

David Raven, another young right back at the club under the Champions League winner, shared a similar tale of a distant coach at the helm.

Stephen Warnock went even further with his criticism of the former Real Madrid and Everton boss, showing a clear trend in this way of thinking.

Whether this can just be seen as players who never managed to make it taking their disappointment out on the man who stopped their dreams, or a distant manager – it’s hard to know.

It seems to be the latter, though that doesn’t mean that he was bad at his job either.

The 64-year-old will certainly be able to back up his methods and we enjoyed plenty of success under his leadership, it just makes you wonder if more could have been achieved had he been more approachable.

You can watch Peltier’s comments on Benitez (from 5:02) via The Football Historian Podcast on YouTube:

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