Rafael Benitez’s Warning To Pep Guardiola’s Side Ahead Of Champions League Semi-Final Against Real Madrid

• Benitez views City’s chief vulnerabilities as set pieces and quick counter attacks
• Manchester City face Real Madrid in the Champions League on Tuesday night
• He says Vinicius, Benzema and Kroos will pass the ball around City and press

In the UEFA conference rooms at Nyon, where the modernist, architecturally-striking confederation headquarters overlook Lake Geneva and the spectacular panorama of the Chablais Alps, Carlo Ancelotti and Rafa Benitez often share a moment. It is a setting as serene as the Atakturk Stadium, Istanbul was wild, passionate and unhinged on a May night eighteen years ago.

Benitez says such moments are for small talk, chat about the game in general. The pair meet at UEFA coaches’ conventions but have never actually fully dissected what occurred in perhaps the greatest Champions League final of all, the victory of Benitez’s Liverpool over Ancelotti’s AC Milan on penalties, after Liverpool recovered from 3-0 down at half-time.

Ancelotti can joke about the game now — he had his revenge, his AC Milan beating Benitez’s Liverpool in the 2007 final in Athens — but when the pair talk, the game only comes up in passing.

‘We agree on one thing: they were better in Istanbul and we were better in Athens!’ Such is the perversity of football.

Ancelotti and Benitez share that bond forever and in the week in which Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City go up against Ancelotti’s Real Madrid, in what feels like European football’s match of the season, it seems a good time to revisit old stories. After all, Benitez had a decent Premier League record at Newcastle against Guardiola’s City: W1 D1 L3.

And his duels with Ancelotti were among the greatest. The half-time team talk in Istanbul should, judging by the second-half performance, have been the greatest display of oratory since Winston Churchill declared Britain would never surrender. And yet truth is never as prosaic as legend.

Benitez was more worried about his English at the time — he had only been in the country a year — and was busy making notes to ensure he communicated the correct message after seeing his side go 2-0 down on 39 minutes. ‘I was writing my notes — ‘Stay calm! Fight for it! Believe! — and then we conceded the third goal!’ he recalls.

He subbed Djimi Traore, who endured a wretched first half, for Dietmar Hamann but then had to send an assistant to retrieve Traore from the shower when he realised Steve Finnan was injured and couldn’t carry on.

He also wanted also to bring on Djibril Cisse until reminded that would leave him with no more subs, Harry Kewell having come off injured. His team talk ended up with 10 names on the whiteboard, having inadvertently left off Luis Garcia in the confusion.

But for all that, the players have since noted just how calm Benitez was that night. ‘If you are nervous and anxious, you can see the manager doesn’t believe what he is saying. And I have to believe.

The main thing was to stay calm, to change the shape of the team. We had started the game more attacking, the idea was not to play short and gradually grow in confidence. But we conceded a goal in the first minute… Then I was thinking, ‘Maybe we will need Plan B!’ Then three goals… ‘Maybe Plan C!’

All this is said with the earnest understatement of a professional coach rather than a raconteur looking for laughs. Benitez’s ability to be deadpan amidst chaos — to keep his head when all about him were losing theirs — is his super power.

Other than the bond forged that night, Ancelotti and Benitez are coaching twins of a kind, a difference that will be evident at the Bernabeu on Tuesday night.