Reina feared Liverpool relegation

Liverpool goalkeeper Pepe Reina has admitted in his new book that he thought the club were going to be relegated under former manager Rafael Benitez.

Benitez departed Anfield after a torrid season in which the team finished seventh, just 12 months after pushing Manchester United all the way in a title challenge.

Reina believes the club were falling off dramatically and had to make a big change to avert a crisis because the manager had lost the support of half of the players in the dressing room, but admits that he was a fan of the Champions League-winning coach.

“When Rafa left Liverpool at the end of the 2009/10 season, I knew that it was the right time for him to go,” Reina wrote in his autobiography Pepe, which is being serialised in the Daily Mirror.

“It hurts me to say that, but the wheels had come off by then and there was no guarantee that he was going to be able to put them back on.”

“I know that I will be forever in his debt for what he has done for my football career, and it is never nice when a manager leaves or loses his job, but there are times when, for whatever reason, the methods that have been bringing a manager so much success just stop working.”

“I was upset, obviously, because it is always sad when a manager loses his job, but even more so when he has been as important to your career as Rafa has been to mine.”

“But I also thought half of the dressing room was not happy and so, probably, for the club if not for me personally, it was the best outcome for everyone.”

The former Villarreal man insists he could tell Liverpool were going to struggle in the 2009/10 season following a pre-season friendly defeat, and feared they could even go down as some of his team-mates began to lose faith in Benitez.

“I first began to realise we were in trouble when we played against Espanyol in a pre-season friendly at the start of August 2009,” he wrote.

“They beat us 3-0 and could have scored more. When I came off the pitch there was a part of me that thought: ‘If we carry on like this, we are going to get relegated’.”

“It was clear that we were nowhere near the level that we wanted to be at. When there are problems at a big club and the atmosphere turns, one of the first comments to be made is always that the manager has lost the dressing room.”

“In this case there were still players who supported the manager, but obviously there were others who were not too happy with him for different reasons.”

Reina also believes Benitez’s failure to adequately replace stars was a vital issue in the manager’s downfall on Merseyside.

“One of the problems we had was that we had lost some good players – Xabi Alonso, Peter Crouch and Jermaine Pennant – but never really replaced them,” he said.

“Signings were made with the idea of making improvements to the team, but the reality was that the ones who came in were not of the same standard as the ones who had left.”

“In football, the buck always stops with the manager. If he makes signings that don’t work out then it won’t be long before the people who run the club are going to ask questions.”