The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion
The Malaysian Insider :: Opinion |
| Benitez in… but Guardiola looms Posted: 23 Nov 2012 04:22 PM PST NOV 24 — The decision taken by Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich to replace Roberto Di Matteo with former Liverpool boss Rafa Benitez is a strange thing indeed. As I wrote earlier this season, I always feared the worst for Di Matteo because he was carrying out a difficult rebuilding job in the knowledge that he was never the man that Abramovich wanted in the first place. Ever since he was appointed, I felt it would just be a matter of time until Di Matteo's Stamford Bridge reign came to a sour end, but I will readily admit that I never expected that ending to come so quickly. Less than a month ago, remember, Chelsea were still unbeaten in the Premier League and had made a solid if unspectacular start to their Champions League campaign — a competition they won, under the management of Di Matteo, just six months ago. Although Chelsea's results and performances in the last few weeks have been poor, the lack of time that Di Matteo was granted to effect an improvement (i.e. no time whatsoever) strongly suggests that Abramovich was simply waiting for any excuse to get rid of him. If it had been the case that Pep Guardiola — long admired and coveted by Abramovich — had signalled a willingness to cut short his year-break from management, it would have been an entirely different matter; Abramovich is known to be desperate to lure the former Barcelona coach to London and would have been forced to take him while he was available. Guardiola, though, is enjoying his temporary new life in New York and quite clearly in no hurry to end his self-imposed sabbatical, so the fact that Abramovich's new hire is Benitez — who has been out of work for two years and, let's face it, hardly had a queue of potential employers banging on his door — makes the whole thing even stranger and even more unfair on Di Matteo. For me, the most striking element is that the recruitment of Benitez seems to go against everything that Abramovich has been longing for. The Russian owner, we are repeatedly told, dearly wants to emulate the attractive, short-passing, possession-based style of play employed by Barcelona; hence his obsession with recruiting Guardiola and the expensive purchases of skilful, ball-playing midfielders Juan Mata, Eden Hazard and Oscar. But if that's the kind of style you're after, Rafa Benitez is one of the worst managers you could choose to lead your team. Benitez has an excellent track record — two heroic La Liga titles in Spain with Valencia and one (admittedly massively fortuitous) Champions League victory with Liverpool — but he is one of football's ultimate pragmatists. His teams have always played functional, efficient football that relies primarily on stopping the opposition and then exploiting their weaknesses rather than thrilling the world with a fluid display of creative flair. For Benitez, results come first; style comes second. There's nothing wrong with that — professional sport is essentially about winning and many successful managers (Jose Mourinho, for example) have exactly the same mindset — but it makes Benitez wholly unsuited to the task of creating a "new Barcelona" at Stamford Bridge. But it's happened, and so Benitez will have his first game as "interim manager" against Manchester City at Stamford Bridge tomorrow. (The common joke, by the way, is that the word "interim" is unnecessary as Chelsea managers invariably end up getting sacked within a few months anyway.) And there's some irony in the identity of Benitez's first opponents, because City — the other "nouveau riche" member of the Premier League elite — are the very club who could ultimately ruin Abramovich's dream by snatching away Guardiola for themselves. Like Abramovich, City's mega-rich foreign owner, Sheikh Mansour of Abu Dhabi, is also possessed by fantasies about modelling his club on the recent successes of Barcelona; the distinct difference, however, is that he's going about it in a much more sensible fashion than his Russian rival by actually putting a solid infrastructure in place. Firstly, City are building a new state-of-the-art training complex which has been heavily influenced by FC Barcelona's recently constructed base a few miles from Camp Nou, housing the first team and Academy playing and coaching staff all under one roof. More significantly, City have also recruited two senior members of staff directly from Barcelona in the last six months: new chief executive Ferran Soriano and director of football Txiki Begiristain both worked closely with Guardiola at Barca — Begiristain, in fact, was chiefly responsible for hiring him. If that's not clearing the path for Guardiola to ultimately be appointed manager, I don't know what is. All of this is rather premature, of course, because City already has a manager in the form of Roberto Mancini, who would feel just as hard done by as Di Matteo if he was dismissed from his position just a few months after leading the club to their first league title in 44 years. However, City's hierarchy prize success in Europe higher than anything else, and their limp departure from this season's Champions League with Wednesday's home draw against vulnerable Real Madrid — making it two years in a row that they've failed to progress beyond the group stage — will not have done Mancini's long-term prospects at City any favours whatsoever. If City go on to retain their Premier League title, which has to be the most probable outcome due to the weaknesses of their direct competitors, Manchester United and Chelsea, Mancini's job would be safe and Guardiola would — perhaps — be tempted to join forces with Abramovich. But if City crumble in the league and finish the season without a trophy to show for their efforts, the short memories that football fans and administrators make their very own specialist subject would come to the fore, leaving Mancini out of work and Guardiola the red-hot favourite to replace him. So tomorrow's meeting between Chelsea and Manchester City will present us with two teams who could very easily be managed by Pep Guardiola next season. But nothing is ever certain in football — just ask sacked Champions League-winning manager Roberto Di Matteo — so, who knows, maybe Pep will end up disappointing them both by taking over at AC Milan. * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
| Posted: 23 Nov 2012 04:13 PM PST NOV 24 — It's an automatic response from people who like to think they are individualistic, unique: dislike someone just because he/she is famous. No matter what the famous person does. Sometimes the reasons for the dislike are mildly ridiculous, like the aversion towards Tom Cruise after he became the face of Scientology or after his marriage to Katie Holmes, which many gossip mongers believe was a sham. Sometimes the reasons for the dislike are quite understandable, like Mel Gibson and his many transgressions, starting from "that" rant against his ex-wife to his controversial remarks about the Jewish people. But I think one of the most despised movie stars of the last decade is most probably one Ben Affleck. Hated mostly for that whole media circus referred to as "Bennifer" involving his relationship with fellow superstar Jennifer Lopez, and he is also resented for his association with everyone's most hated Hollywood director, Michael Bay. Starring in two of Bay's most despised movies, Armageddon and Pearl Harbor, Affleck didn't help matters when he also starred in the universally trashed Gigli alongside J-Lo, giving loads of people everywhere more than good enough reasons to hate him. Even though I'm a fan of some of his movies, especially the ones by his friend Kevin Smith like Dogma and Jersey Girl (yes, I happen to think that it's a pretty sweet movie!) and the one he wrote with Matt Damon, Good Will Hunting, by the time Bennifer happened I also thought that he was so overexposed that I started to overlook the fact that the guy might have talent after all. So when news came out a few years back that Mr Affleck was directing his own film — his debut was Gone Baby Gone — I almost gave it a pass just because it was Ben Affleck. I'm pretty sure many out there actually did give it a pass too because of the same reason. Those who did would've missed a surprisingly very good debut film, as I was forced to eat my words and admit that Mr Affleck truly has the makings of a great classical film-maker in the vein of Sidney Lumet. It was still a Hollywood film, but with a wonderful attention to the local details of its Boston setting, making it feel strikingly authentic and armed with a plot twist that's emotionally powerful. A few years later he followed that up with The Town, another Hollywood film in the form of a heist thriller, and again impressively shot in the classical filmmaking style of making the most of the virtues of a well-placed camera and non-fancy, smooth editing. By this point many people had probably accepted that the seemingly limited Ben Affleck the actor might not mean that Ben Affleck the director is quite as limited as well. Having the chance to watch his latest his latest film Argo, a crowd favourite at this year's Toronto Film Festival before David O. Russell's latest film The Silver Linings Playbook pipped it to the Audience Award, I'm very happy to report that Mr Affleck does himself proud once again with that rarest of beasts — a big-budget Hollywood picture that doesn't insult your intelligence and does everything that it's supposed to do beautifully and unfussily. Argo is based on the unbelievably real story of how six US Embassy staff, who managed to escape the hostage taking of 52 other staff members at the US Embassy in Tehran (and escaping without the knowledge of the Iranian militants taking over the embassy), were extracted out of Iran by the CIA using the pretext that they were a Canadian film crew in Iran scouting for locations for a sci-fi movie. As strange as this may sound, it's remarkable how this really happened, and the movie has a lot of fun exploring the absurdity of it all, but without forgetting the dangerously thrilling risk of how such a flimsy idea and plan could go wrong. The film's opening montage, in a truly un-Hollywood move, sets out a history lesson about Iran and the United States' involvement in installing the Shah after a coup to overcome the nation's democratically elected government. But even more remarkable are the scenes of the embassy takeover, involving crowds of the scale that Mr Affleck's never attempted before, calmly and confidently shot and edited with such skill that not merely hints at but confirms his talent and arrival as a quality, big-time Hollywood film-maker. With an easygoing and comic middle section involving the setting up of a fake Hollywood movie (which is not that different from a real one!), Mr Affleck's got us like putty in his hands again when the big finale comes, which I guarantee will send your pulses racing with suspense. I wonder what sort of movie he'll make next, but judging from the steady and confident increase in scale and budget of his first three movies, and the non-diminishing qualities of all three, I think we'll all totally forget Bennifer once the next one comes. Maybe we've already forgotten now even? * The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the columnist. |
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