Pako’s ‘F**k!’ moment at Liverpool Lime Street sums up our great support

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Pako Ayesteran is a much loved figure for his work here as Rafa Benitez assistant.

He joined with his Spanish counterpart from Valencia in 2004 and was part of the coaching staff that helped us secure the Champions League in 2005, the FA Cup in 2006 and a failed charge for the title in 2008/09.

He fell out with Benitez though in 2010 and the pair are only now on speaking terms again.

As a result, the coach has given a lengthy interview in which he’s explained what life in England was like and what he brought to the Premier League in football terms.

According to Pako, he and Benitez introduced some more complex sports science attitudes that even the likes of Arsene Wenger had yet to pick up on.

“We helped English football evolve,” he told MailOnline.

“The players were a bit surprised by the level of monitoring and control. We were taking decisions for them over many facets of where they’d been used to be left alone – diet, training, hours of sleep.

“Rafa started building a database of players, too,” he continued.

“He has what can only be described as an obsession – in a good way – over control and being right across things. The idea of worldwide scouting was quite new but he had this database of over 10,000 players, which was new for the time.

“It was training, factors that influence recovery and recuperation, charts of exactly how many minute a player had played over a season. We dug our man-made ‘Pako Hills’, three mounds with different gradients, at the club’s training ground for stamina and resistance training.”

Pako said he loved Liverpool because of the people and how warmly he was welcomed to the city, which is in complete opposition to the attitudes of Spanish fans.

“At Liverpool, I loved it from day one. It’s the feeling of belonging to a club, to a community. I was in Liverpool Lime Street and people were coming up to me, saying thank you, thank you for coming. I’m thinking ‘f***!'” he said/.

“I was in Valencia for many years and I’m only stopped in the street to be criticised and then I come here and they are saying thank you before I have even started.”

Interestingly, he also claimed he turned down a job at Chelsea due to his connection with Liverpool, which is something Benitez did not do, of course.

“After I left Liverpool, one of the things I said was that I would not go to direct rivals,” he said.

“When Jose Mourinho was sacked, Avram Grant called me while at Chelsea and asked me to join his technical team. It was a great opportunity but I felt it would be wrong.”

Since leaving Liverpool in 2007, he’s won titles in Mexico and Israel, before returning to Valencia as manager; but sadly he was fired early on this season after a poor La Liga start and is still out of work.

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