Benitez doesn't need an inspired Bolton now

SOCCER ANGLES:A league defeat at Bolton today would remove a chunk of the credit Benitez has built up since his arrival five years ago.

THE SPANISH league season has not begun and yet already they are calling Xabi Alonso the “conductor of the orchestra” at Real Madrid. It’s some title, some role: the man who directs the flow that Kaka or Cristiano Ronaldo or Karim Benzema then takes on and uses for their own purposes. That’s the plan anyway. Alonso may not carry the swaggering personality of a natural Galactico, but at €34 million, he is in their price bracket.

Meanwhile at Anfield they gripe about Lucas Levia.

Moaning is not a Liverpool monopoly, all fans do it, but it might feel different should Rafael Benitez’s team lose at Bolton this afternoon. Then England’s airwaves will sound like a national version of Radio Merseyside.

Understandably Benitez said yesterday it is too soon in the season to be experiencing angst, but a loss at Bolton would alter even his certainty in that conviction.

The chances must be that Liverpool will not lose at the Reebok Stadium: they won 2-0 there last November via goals from Dirk Kuyt and Steven Gerrard and it was the fifth time in a row that they have beaten Bolton. So there should be no fearing Bolton, particularly as this season Wanderers have lost 1-0 at home to Sunderland and 1-0 away to Hull.

Those results have put Gary Megson under pressure – something he has had to deal with from his unpopular day one – and there is an international break coming up, worryingly for him.

So, if we are to be betting with common sense, Benitez should be in happier mood this evening than he was after the visit of Aston Villa to Anfield. Much of his irritation then stemmed from Liverpool’s failure to convert early opportunities, very good ones, and in that Benitez was justified.

Afterwards his criticism of the “senior players” made more than Gerrard’s ears prick up. Benitez’s attempts yesterday to soothe his words’ sting may only have highlighted them again.

But then maybe that might do some good, a little motivational friction.

If that is the case and Liverpool develop from here, then this will be reviewed as an unhelpful blip, but a blip.

The problem arises if that is not the true situation and that what Benitez was expressing was something deeper and something that he has felt for longer. That after all is why Alonso is now at Real Madrid.

A Premier League season is so dense with details that it is easy to forget that Alonso began to think about departure a year ago, even though he was settled at the club and a vital part of the team.

But Benitez was noticing that less and less while simultaneously dreaming of Gareth Barry more and more. Once last summer it became public and established as fact that Liverpool were so keen on Barry they would pay Villa £18 million for him – £6 million more than Manchester City eventually paid – Alonso’s future at Anfield was obviously going to be difficult.

What stymied Benitez was Martin O’Neill’s persistent whispering in Barry’s ear: “One more season.” So Barry stayed and Benitez still had Alonso. He is not one to throw tantrums but it must have been a concerned Alonso who felt his manager did not believe in him the way he did before. That can shatter a player’s confidence and how did Alonso feel when, on the opening day of last season, Benitez left him on the bench at Sunderland, while someone called Damien Plessis started? Alonso started the next match. When Liverpool topped the Premier League for the first time in October, it was courtesy of Alonso’s winner at Stamford Bridge. Alonso will have known it and Benitez will have known it, but others may have forgotten that the victory at Chelsea was the first time Liverpool, in over four seasons under Benitez, had won on one of their top-four rivals’ grounds in the league.

Clearly, demonstrably, Liverpool were making progress. Further proof came at Old Trafford in March in that historic 4-1 triumph. That result, more than any other, sustained Liverpool fans’ optimism through pre-season.

Yet two games before winning at Manchester United, Liverpool lost at Middlesbrough. It was a strange afternoon, one memorable for Gerrard’s undisguised annoyance at having to share the pitch with Nabil El-Zhar.

Another annoyed man was Benitez who, after one failed Alonso long pass, turned to his dugout with arms out in a ‘see what I mean’ gesture. Oh, for Gareth Barry, he must have been thinking.

But here Benitez is: no Barry, no Alonso, no Alberto Aquilani either. And he thinks Gerrard needs to improve.

Middlesbrough, as everyone has said this week, was one of only two league defeats last season, and now Liverpool have two already.

A third at Bolton would remove a chunk of the credit Benitez has built up since his arrival five years ago. There is ongoing understanding of the American circumstances in which Benitez has to function.

What Benitez needs less than anything is for Bolton to be inspired, then Xabi Alonso to appear on his television pinging passes to Kaka and Ronaldo at a swooning Bernabeu. Benitez can do something about the first, he has already played his role in the second.

Familiar pattern visible at Ipswich

ONE CLUB that has lost more games than Liverpool is Ipswich Town. Following what happened at Sunderland three years ago, there was an expectation that Roy Keane would light the same spark in Suffolk and off Ipswich would rocket to the Premier League.

It's not quite that straightforward, though. Until Christmas in his first season on Wearside, Sunderland were average one week, poor the next. Occasionally they were quite good.

Then Jonny Evans appeared in January from Manchester United. Here was a Champions League defender in the making, a possible future United captain, playing against the likes of Colchester and Luton. Sunderland lost one of Evans's 18 league games on the way to promotion.

Evans was Keane's best signing, a €1.7 million loan fee that repaid itself. But few of the rest can be categorised that way.

Unless a manager is a hands-on, day-to-day coach who spends time improving individuals, then he lives or dies by his signings. At Sunderland Keane's signings showed a lack of imagination and, make no mistake, they would have been relegated last season had he not walked out.

Now a pattern appears to be repeating itself at Ipswich of Keane wanting to sign players he has worked with before.

A guess would be that it doesn't work. But if Keane walks out again, who will offer him a way back?