He comes to Anfield without a whiff of the Mersey in his bones. Benitez is the first Liverpool manager since the sainted Bill Shankly with absolutely no previous connection to the club. Until Houllier replaced Roy Evans in November 1998, all Shankly's successors had previously played and worked for the club. Even Houllier could claim to have lived in Liverpool and stood on the Kop to watch Shankly's teams.
In the words of Stephen Kelly, the foremost historian of Liverpool football, Benitez's appointment is "the final break with the boot-room. Houllier was a Liverpool fan; he knew about the traditions of the boot-room and tried to recreate it. That has finally gone. But I have talked to the Liverpool chief executive Rick Parry at length and he says Benitez is astonished at the quality he has been left."
A lot of that quality is tied up in the academy at Kirkby which eats away £3m of Liverpool's budget and has produced no player of note since Gerrard made his debut six years ago. Kelly argues that the talent is there, but a fall-out between Houllier and the academy director, Steve Heighway, meant it was never properly utilised. "Heighway kept telling Houllier to pick the young players but he never did, which was amazing given his record with the French academy at Clairefontaine," Kelly said. "There was a lad called John Otsemobor, who came in, did very well and was never heard of again."
Having studied Wenger's coaching at first hand, Parry would want Benitez to be like the Arsenal manager in the international transfer market. This is a very tall order. Houllier knows the French game as intimately as Benitez had studied the Spanish market. In his six years at Anfield Houllier signed 18 players who were either French or from French clubs at a cost of more than £52m and not one could be counted an unqualified success. Benitez's first transfer deal, the defender, Josemi, was predictably from Spain, although not much store should be set by first arrivals. Houllier's first signing was Frode Kippe, Shankly's was Sammy Reid from Motherwell.
None of that will matter if Benitez delivers a first championship since the Thatcher era to Anfield. When Valencia took La Liga for the second time, Benitez gathered his players at the shrine of the Virgin of the Helpless, the city's patron saint. Liverpool are not helpless or even hopeless but should Benitez succeed, Anfield, a ground which traditionally was a beacon to the Catholic heart of Merseyside, will become a shrine once more.
