Thursday, March 29, 2012
Rafael Benitez has advised Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini to forget about trying to win any mind games in the battle for the Premier League title.
Benitez came off worst in his psychological warfare with Alex Ferguson but the former Liverpool and Inter Milan boss claims such tactics will make little difference to the outcome of this season’s title race.
Benitez, speaking at the Soccerex conference, said: “As a manager you need to worry about your job and your team — not the mind games.
“People are talking about mind games with Man U and City. Both teams are very good teams and if City win their next match 5-0 people will say Mancini is not affected by the mind games. If they lose it’s ‘oh — the mind games’.
“When you have a lot of foreign players, normally they don’t read the newspapers so the mind games for them are nothing. I don’t think that it’s important or makes a big difference. The main thing is if you have a good team you can win all the mind games, if you don’t have a good team you can’t.
“I think it (the title race) will be tough until the end”