Rafa Benitez stands, hip flexed to 45 degrees.

He has just taken a 45-minute session with his midfield and defensive players devoted to movements. The point he has been hammering home to his players is about body positions and how the way you shape your hip when the opposition have the ball makes a difference. A searching pass over the top of Newcastle’s back four will cause problems in the Premier League: every team has the pace to exploit the space in behind you. If you anticipate and prime your body, you can shave a second off your response time. It might be crucial.

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Benitez’s second sport is basketball, which is a game of movement and response. He’s fascinated with the way angles and shape determine that sport but tells his players it is just the same in football.

He will readily acknowledge that there aren’t too many other Premier League managers who go into this kind of detail. It is why he thinks he can extract improvement from a team who are – by and large – reliant on many of the same players and characters who delivered the team from the second tier at the first time of asking.

A new challenge needed a new approach. Benitez might not like it being billed as such, but this is the second part of the ongoing ‘Rafalution’ of Newcastle: yet this time the easy, quick wins of re-painting the training ground to give the appearance of a new start and re-stocking the squad with players who are – to put it bluntly – better than their rivals are not available.

The alternative is this: painstaking, meticulous work on extracting the smallest of improvements from his players. Ten points from seven games is a decent return. There is a ceiling at which Newcastle will bump their heads while Benitez did not get what he needed in the summer in terms of additions, but he can see a trajectory which United can follow.

“I can still see plenty of room for improvement,” he says, 20 minutes in a two-hour appointment at the training ground, his office bathed in autumn afternoon sun. “When I say that phrase in the press conference it is not because I have to say this. It is because I can see this.”

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The leather folder:

You suspect that Benitez likes it this way. Although he says the level of detail he indulges in is essential, it is also exactly what he likes doing. And he has a group at Newcastle who will listen: those who do not want to learn have either been shipped out, exiled or can be managed within a squad who – by and large – are a dream to work with. There are no egos here.

Benitez’s professional world is in a brown leather folder than he unzips to reveals sheets of neatly coloured and spaced pieces of paper. He has a Apple Mac on his desk loaded with folders full of clips of every game this season and their future opponents, but next to that there’s a printer. The sheets it coughs out all go in the brown folder.

“Here you see the micro cycles during the week,” he says. There’s a training schedule at the top of the page with what comes later in the week and month. Below that, a green football pitch rectangle with dots representing the players. There are four rectangles: even the warm up is detailed on it. There are exercises with times next to them – and the conditions in which each football exercise should be carried out.

The players are listed in groups and the two injured players at Newcastle – Paul Dummett and Massadio Haidara – are in a column of their own.

“The way you train is important and with this methodology you have less injuries. Before we came, there were a lot of injuries. Not any more.”

The other sheets reveal the results of tests carried out earlier in the week. There are statistics for every player from the last game and for the team. Pink represents negatives to be worked on; white is positives.

There is a sheet with players being looked at for future transfer windows – moved quickly enough for prying eyes not to see any names on it – and, of course, a sheet with pictures of the journalists he’s speaking to. He chuckles. “At the beginning I told Wendy I needed to know everyone,” he says. Are the journalists’ characteristics marked up in pink? “It’s only negatives with the journalists!” he jokes.

(Image: Newcastle United)

The evolving style:

All of this information is nothing new. But Newcastle’s approach to the Premier League is very different to the way they looked at trying to win the Championship.

Benitez loves solving problems: he has done since he was a boy and became obsessed by the boardgame Stratego to the extent that he spent a summer working out ways to beat his brother every single team. So the problem of playing against better, stronger, faster and more organised teams with a Newcastle side largely pruned from the same players who won the second tier has been approached with the same forensic detail.

I ask him to join the dots of the inconclusive information about Newcastle’s start to the season. How can his team be the second lowest in terms of possession and passes and be unremarkable in terms of ground covered and yet have looked at home in the division?

These are markers that we might have looked at in the past and thought indicated how good a team is. Benitez warms to the theme.

“There are different type of stats that you can manage whichever way you want to. But we are not worried about them,” he explains.

“Earlier this week I saw an article that was about the kilometres that they have run but that means nothing. That’s nothing. You have two defenders and there are two defenders of the other team: you give the ball away and you have to run 80metres to recover the ball. The defenders of the other team are on top of you because you have plenty of possession: how far do they run?

“They cannot, because they do not have space to run. One team may be running more than the other but it means nothing because it depends on the context of the game. You may play counter-attack and you have to run because you have too much space or the other team may be on top of you. The difference normally is the high intensity of the sprint - not how many kilometres you’ve run.

“The possession stats? Well, our shots on target are fine. When you don’t have much possession it’s normally because you play counter-attack. This is not the Championship where we were much better than most of the teams. This is the Premier League where normally you have less quality than some of the others.

“People may talk about possession but if you have the ball and give the ball away that doesn’t matter. I would like to have a little bit more (possession) but I’m not worried about that. What I’m thinking is: can we create chance? We have chances.

“Can we take our chances? We can improve on that. We can improve on everything. The stats depend on the context of the game. Some games we run too much, which is wrong. Some games you run a lot and it’s perfect because you need to.”

Don’t get it twisted: Benitez wants his team to be more comfortable in possession and to gain more control. Every day in training he sees a team that is confident on the ball and players who are ready to play passes. But he notes that sometimes that evaporates when they actually enter the field of play.

He anticipates that will improve with the work they are doing every day. How quickly will depend on how malleable the players are; how open they are to new ideas and how quickly they adapt to the new challenges.

And there are some players who are doing that quicker than others. Jamaal Lascelles has improved at a rate that has surprised and encouraged his coaches. For others the process is a longer one: Chancel Mbemba’s communication still suffers because his English is patchy. He can now understand the language but still struggles to communicate his feelings. Florian Lejeune’s introduction may kick-start improvements somewhere along the line.

The long process:

This is the longer process Benitez is engaged in at Newcastle. The easy wins have been chalked up but the longer battle is under way and it won’t be won easily. It might never be won in Benitez’s head: every point and passage of play is looked at for areas where the players and team can get better.

“It’s a long process and we are started (on it),” he says.

“When we played in the Championship, we played another style because we were on top of them. You have more possession, more chances, more shots. In the Premier League you have to defend and play counter-attack if you want to stay on top of them you have to do almost everything right. It’s almost another style. And then it’s still a long process.

“On Thursday we were doing some exercises on the movements of the defenders and midfielders when we are in possession. I can still see plenty of room for improvement.

“When I say that in the press conference it is not because I have to say this. It is because I can see this. You see players and they still have to adjust their movements slightly.

“We have analysed the clips of the movements in the Liverpool game. Before the game we said to the players ‘Be careful: They score many goals from counter attacks,’ Two minutes in they have a counter-attack. Why? Because our two full-backs were quite high, we shot when we should have passed and they blocked.

“That for me is the key. You have to understand what you have to do in each moment. Some people think that quality is about technical ability to kick the ball and pass the ball and whatever. No: it is to decide the right thing to do at the right moment.

“If you have to clear, you clear. If you have to shoot, you shoot. If you need to pass, you pass. Still I think we have plenty of room for improvement in these areas – with the ball, without the ball, movement, communication.

“Take the goal we conceded. People say it was a great goal by Coutinho. It was a lack of communication before the goal. Bad movement, a lack of communication and then he scores. All of these things we can improve.

“We cut them into clips and show them to the players – not to give them a bad feeling (about their performance) but to show they can learn and improve. ‘Did you see that? If you make this movement, it will improve next time’.

“We try to teach them about the game: it’s the way they will improve. When you talk about Lascelles or another player is improving it’s not just because they are training a lot. It’s because we are trying to give them the problems and they have to find the solutions.”

The Premier League game plan(s):

“We have 20 gameplans for every game,” Benitez says. “But they do not just come because we think them up in the morning.”

Benitez loves working with Newcastle’s analysts. He thinks their work is essential to what United are trying to do: and when they have provided him with over an hour of clips of important passages of play, his assistant Paco Moreno will boil them down to another 45 minutes.

These will be reduced further to manageable chunks for the players.

“With all of this information you decide the game plan and we ask the players to follow it. If it does not work you have an alternative plan. And then another plan.” That’s what he means by having 20 plans.

This information comes not just from the computer and Opta pro but also from word-of-mouth. Benitez had inside information about the mood in the camp at Liverpool – about how it might affect them at key points in the game – from his contacts on Merseyside. It’ll be the same next week when they face Southampton, a team led by Mauricio Pellegrino – a former player who he recognises as a similarly forensic footballing mind. Pellegrino was the “brain” of his Valencia defence, even if the tigerish Robert Ayala was sometimes a more eye-catching presence. It’s no surprise to Benitez that the Southampton manager has made a successful start to his managerial career.

While many might see a visit to St Mary’s as a possible three points, Benitez recognises how difficult that might be. But he has faith in the gameplan – and believes his players do too. “We are following a process,” he says.

“The guys in the analysis department do a great job. They have the clips and we always have a game plan. If the game plan isn’t working, we will change it.

“But you don’t have a game plan because you come in one morning and think ‘This is the game plan’. It’s because you have been working (for a long time) and you are thinking for a long time about what is the best way to play this game.

The future:

These are not the words of someone planning for a quick getaway at Newcastle, despite the very real sense of frustration at feeling his advice and exhortations in the summer were – partly, at least – ignored. He knows there are things to improve at Newcastle but the culture feels good. The public are onside, the momentum of the city has turned again.

Benitez does not take the appreciation of the supporters for granted. “They appreciate things. They are not stupid - they have a little bit of information. They know we work hard and we try always to work on that,” he said.

It is the one guarantee that he can offer. It is the one reason why Newcastle supporters feel comfortable with him in the dug-out, pouring every hour into “the process”.