Sky Sports pundit lost for words at Everton revelations on Rafa Benitez and Alex Iwobi
We’re delighted to welcome former Everton striker Kevin Campbell as our exclusive columnist. Each week the former Toffees captain will be giving his views on the biggest talking points at Goodison Park…
Rafa Benitez’s refusal to believe the stats from Alex Iwobi’s fitness tests at Everton and in the player himself has left Kevin Campbell lost for words.
Injured winger Andros Townsend, working as a pundit on Sky Sports for the game at Tottenham on Saturday (15 October) revealed the former manager’s stance and how it took Frank Lampard showing faith in him to unleash the midfielder’s potential.
Campbell, himself a Sky Sports pundit, can’t believe the fact Benitez would decide to overlook the numbers and has dismissed the ex-Liverpool manager as a “nightmare”.
Speaking exclusively to Goodison News he said: “At the end of the day if a manager doesn’t believe the stats, I don’t know what to say. Because they’re his staff aren’t they?
“I think sometimes it just comes down to whether he likes you or not. If a manager likes you, he’s willing to put his arm round you and make sure you’re alright, but if the manager’s not having you, he doesn’t really fancy you as a player, then he can come up with anything.
“They say, ‘Stats don’t lie’, but stats do lie sometimes. He doesn’t believe them, so that means he doesn’t believe in the player. Simple as that.
“That ship’s sailed. Rafa Benitez has been talking like he had a wonderful tenure at Goodison Park, he didn’t. He was absolutely a nightmare.
“And not to say he hasn’t been a great manager in the past, but his tenure at Everton was awful, so let’s move on from that.”
It was awful and the apparent hard-headed insistence that he knew better than the outcome of the fitness tests, is in many ways emblematic of his time at Goodison.
Why make players do the tests if you aren’t going to accept what comes back?
But just as that is a negative, it is a positive for Lampard that he has done what various managers at Everton and Arsenal couldn’t in getting the best out of Iwobi, who is sure to be a big part of getting the Toffees back to winning ways.