He is in shorts and cap on the training pitch. “Passes, more pressing,” Rafa Benítez barks. He is working on Newcastle United’s defensive shape, repeating drills so that good habits become ingrained. He beckons his players into a circle, his foot on the ball, and begins asking questions. “It’s what I try to do,” he says later. “I’m 100 per cent convinced they will improve if they think. If they think, they learn.”

If anything can encapsulate Benítez’s philosophy, it is this. All managers must be motivators, psychologists and politicians, but the Spaniard prods intellect as well as stirring blood. “I was a PE teacher,” he says. “You can give orders. Or you can say, ‘Listen, we have these problems, so give me a solution,’