Appearing as a guest on Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football, former Liverpool manager Rafa Benitez explained one huge detail about his preparation and eye for detail that helped Liverpool win the 2005 Champions League final.

Appearing alongside Jamie Carragher, who was part of Benitez’s side in Istanbul back in 2005, Benitez gave a wonderful anecdote about the level of detail that e and his staff went into regarding penalty shootouts.

He said that ever since he was a young coach, Benitez would watch games on television and would make notes of every penalty that he saw and put them into a database. That way, he was building up a profile of the type of penalties that players from all over the world were taking.

He explained that when it came to shootouts, players would often, due to a bit of fatigue and pressure, revert to their favoured type of spot-kick so he estimated that knowing this data gave his goalkeeper, Jerzy Dudek, and 80% chance of making saves.

Then he spoke about how this level of preparation, which he started over 20 years before the 2005 final, came to help his side win the Champions League.

Of the five of the (Milan) penalty takers, only (Jon Dahl) Tomasson we didn’t have penalties of, the others, we had the penalties.

We won the Champions League and people say ‘oh, you were lucky.’ No, we did it because we had more control of (the shootout).

Would you like to see Rafa Benitez back as Liverpool manager one day in the future?

Yes

No