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When Rafa Benitez was told on Tuesday that he’d won the Skybet Championship manager of the month award for October, he made a simple request.

Could we make sure, he enquired, that the club commissioned a photo of his entire coaching staff with the award and not just one of him clutching the award?

To understand how Newcastle works under Benitez, it is important to look beyond the cult of the individual. There’s no doubt that he’s a crucially important figurehead for the club’s renaissance – a man who has driven the club to embrace a new era by utilising his experience and knowledge to win round the board, players and supporters.

Leading is a skill and Benitez does the people part of the job really well. On the grey, drizzly day we are at the training ground, his voice crackles with a cold but there’s an email on his desk from a supporter who has written a book who would like to meet Benitez. Quietly, he’s accommodated many of these requests.

He wants to know and absorb the culture of the club. Benitez believes it will make him better able to fashion a football club that will make supporters proud if he understands all of the things that feed into it.

(Image: Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)

He arrived at the club amid talk of a “Rafalution”. But this is an evolution: no-one has departed who wanted to stay. Benitez saw that there were already many good people at the club, they just needed to be managed slightly differently. There is a buzz among many people who might have feared that they would lose their jobs after relegation and a change of direction under Benitez.

But the manager knows, too, that giving the club a winning team requires more than just paying lip service to Newcastle’s traditions. And there is one thing that he will not compromise on: his approach and methodology, which have been consistent wherever he’s been.

He leads this but it is his coaching team who help to put it into practice. To understand Benitez the football man, you need to understand the people around him. There are those he has worked with throughout his career – at Newcastle that is Francisco De Miguel Moreno, or ‘Paco’, and Antonio Gomez Perez.

He has added first team coach Mikel Antia, who played for him at Real Madrid, this summer, but has also integrated Ian Cathro. Benitez also requested that we interview Dr Paul Catterston, the club’s doctor. In a nod to the Spanish model, the medical department is no longer considered separate from the coaching side.

Over two parts, this is their story – in their own words.

IAN CATHRO (First team coach):

In the coaches’ office at the training ground, there are four neat desks, evenly spaced from each other. Each has an Apple mac on it and a neat stack of paper; each of them is perfectly maintained. Behind them is a whiteboard displaying the fixtures, training schedule and other pertinent player information.

If the idea is to convey a sense of collective responsibility between Benitez’s four coaches, it works. This office is meant to be conduicive to communication and – despite the two languages being spoken – a free exchange of ideas and views. That idea is why Benitez wanted either all of his coaches to feature in this piece or none of them: they are all equally important cogs in the well-oiled black and white engine.

For Cathro, it is the second managerial regime he’s worked under. 15 months has sometimes felt like more and when our photographer asks him to smile a bit for the picture we’ve commissioned he grimaces and deadpans: “I did smile once. I think.”

Appointed by Steve McClaren on the strength of his work in Portugal, Benitez retained him to ensure an easy transition. He was impressed by the things fed back to him. It’s easy to see why: Cathro chooses his words carefully and methodically but he has bought in totally to the Benitez model.

“What we have here is very collective,” he says. It is not a British model, he believes, but a Continental one – where there is not one autocratic voice but a collection of coaches all working with one very clear objective.

Benitez has worked hard to ensure they all understand exactly what it is they are trying to do: the way they work, they way they play and the end game is reinforced every day. Benitez loves to talk about “consistency” and his coaches have to be the same.

Cathro is young but he’s no pushover. Jack Colback says he takes “no sh*t” on the training pitch and will pull up sessions if the intensity isn’t right.

His responsibility is to convey the ideas that Benitez has to the players in the training sessions. “The primary task is helping the players reach a point where they feel entirely clear and comfortable with what the manager is asking,” he says.

“I’m not sure previously the players were convinced about what we were trying to do. And the players have to be convinced of how we’re going to do certain things and operate in certain parts of the game. My job is to help communicate those ideas from the manager to the players.”

On Benitez, he is especially fascinating. “His attention to detail is excellent. The best way to describe him is that his ability to see a game of football and immediately understand all of aspects of it is unique,” he says.

“It’s difficult to know exactly why someone is doing something when you’re not involved in it but he can immediately have a pretty strong idea of why one player has done something, why the backline is playing as it is and so on.

“He’s at that point of expertise and experience where his brain process is that ‘bang’. He understands it.

“That’s why he’s so good. He has his own vision and convictions and a clear direction about where he wants to go but he can also process what is going on instantly. So that means he can change things as they are happening.

“One of the things the team has made progress on is that there have been several occasions where we’ve been on the edge of making an error but we’ve fixed it before it has slapped us in the face. Not everyone can do that.”

Last year, it was not always so simple. McClaren came in with an idea of helping to turn United into a team that could control games by dominating possession. Cathro thinks he knows why it didn’t work.

“(Steve) did want to make us a team that could control the ball better and be a bit better in possession. That’s probably been evident in his experiences prior to Newcastle – that’s what is natural to him, to have a team that can ‘play football’, to have possession and to initiate play with possession and take that position in the game.

“It started OK but you’ve got to be very, very convinced of that and we lacked conviction. When you lack conviction it’s difficult to turn your process into results and you get a different challenge.

“The reason it didn’t work was part circumstancial, part various factors and the culmination of it was an environment which wasn’t conduicive to us being successful and as a result of that we weren’t.”

Cathro worked in Portugal and Spain and believes the challenge of the Premier League is that games are not so easily managed. In Portugal, if you’re 2-0 up by 55 minutes he says, the game is over. “That’s not the case in England: the game is always alive because the fans demand it is. So it’s a very different environment to try and manage games in,” he says.

It has not been easy, but Cathro has thoroughly enjoyed it. “I haven’t been here an overly long time but it does feel like an awful lot has happened.

“I’ve been here across two managers. I can’t exactly tell you why but I already care about the club. I do feel something for it and it really should be doing all the things that it is doing now.

“It should be getting back to the level where it’s ready to fight to be competitive. I think we’re en route with that but it needs to be a patient thing. Everyone needs to be taking steps at the same speed: we can’t let someone get ahead of it.

“We’re growing, we’re improving and there’s a lot of work taking part – some of it’s visible, some of it’s not so visible. The fans, the city, the media: it can come to life again.”

DR PAUL CATTERSON (Club doctor):

Before he worked at United, Catterson used to work 12-hour night shifts in the Accident and Emergency at the old Newcastle General Hospital.

It meant emergency resucitation, dealing with the urgent aftermath of car crashes and terrible accidents. “I have seen some interesting things,” he says, with disarming understatement.

A Liverpool season ticket holder until 1994, when he came to train in Newcastle, he took on a full-time role at the club when Alan Shearer was parachuted in to save Newcastle from relegation. Before then he was assisting with Pontins League games while completing a Sports Medicine degree. His eight years have been eventful.

If you want an example of the effect Benitez has had on existing staff, Dr Catterson is one of the best people to talk to. He acknowledges that the new coach has shifted the culture completely when it comes to medicine, injury prevention and physiotherapy.

“The manager has changed the culture and environment,” he says.

“He’s made the current staff feel very valued and got the best out of them but also we’ve added to the team, which is something we’ve wanted to do for a while. We’ve added to the team with additional skills though, so it’s more of a Spanish model now.

“They approach physiotherapy a little bit differently so we’ve got a new physiotherapist and a new rehab and conditioning coach. But they’re complimenting the skills of the English physio.

“The key for me, because it’s been said we’ve had a lot of injuries over the years, which we have, is the culture and communication. That’s why it has changed. You can do anything that it says in a text book but putting it into practice in an elite environment is quite different. When you have a manager that listens and trusts and makes you feel part of the team and is appreciating your opinion, then it creates a very good atmosphere.

“If I go to the manager in the morning or speak to Paco, his assistant, and say ‘Someone is feeling something’ or we need to be cautious or watch them or that someone should do the first part of the session and then dip out, he will listen.

“Obviously it’s easier when you’re winning but now we’ll try and keep players going so they don’t spend as much time in a the physio’s room. We’re trying to get them more physically moving all the time.”

United’s injury problems have been a major factor in their failings in recent seasons. This season, they have had very few of the problems that blighted McClaren and Alan Pardew.

Catterson acknowledges that. “I think it’s a combination of factors why it’s better. But I strongly believe that the main thing is the culture that comes from the manager. The way he communicates with everybody is brilliant – from the kitchen staff to his most senior staff.

“He looks all of us in the eye in the morning and you really get that connection. So for me, everything that is going well off-the-field is being replicated on it.

“The key to improving injuries is definitely the communication between medical staff and the coaching staff. There’s certainly a harmony there now too.”

Catterson says that the continual change over eight years has made it difficult to “grow” the team as he wanted. And there’s a point to be learned there too: United have invested in the medical department.

This summer, they added two further jobs: a physio and a rehab and conditioning coach. Both were Spanish, bringing a Continental approach that Benitez and his team are more familiar with.

“Traditionally the English physio would take a player from the treatment bed to the gym, to on the pitch to training. The Spanish physio is going to concentrate on the treatment table and the gym. We have a conditioning coach who will concentrate on the gym and the outside.

“It’s a different way of working because their skills are honed in a different way but the overall result is a more rounded player when they come back from injury.

“So the English physios are learning from that but also vice versa, the Spanish physios are learning from the English physios too. It’s just been really good team work.”

MIKEL ANTIA (First team coach):

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The chemistry of the coaches is fascinating. If Moreno and Benitez are the outgoing, charismatic members of the team, Antia and Gomez are quieter, more serious. It feels like a good mix.

Antia played for Benitez in the Real Madrid youth team but was working in Doha for the Aspire Academy when he got the summer phone call asking him if he fancied swapping the heat of Qatar for Tyneside. His job there was to help harness the millions on offer by the sporting authorities and turn it into tangible results in time for the 2022 World Cup, which Qatar see as a chance to showcase their football team to the world.

At Newcastle, the demand is instant. But it was a chance he could not refuse. “I thought: ‘Wow, what a good chance to start another experience in my career’.

“It isn’t just about coming to work with Rafa. It is about working with this team because they have been working as a staff for a long time. It’s not just to join the manager, it’s to join the staff.”

Antia’s role is to implement Benitez’s ideas but he has a specific instruction to work on set pieces. United’s improvement at them this season is surely no coincidence.

“I am taking care of the set pieces, that is my main role,” he says.

“It is not my only role and I am not the only one who does this: Antonio helps me a lot. It’s not just me in charge of it.

“We see ourselves as a chain and I am just one part of that. I’m trying to help on set pieces and to help on the daily training sessions. We ask ourselves: What do we need to do on a daily basis to get better? I will help set up the pitch and the field on a daily basis to help with the players.

“Whatever Antonio, the boss, Paco and Ian need, we work together to provide it.”

Collectivity is Antia’s main theme. “Like Antonio, I was one of Rafa’s players. It’s not something new for me to work with him. I didn’t arrive new and know nothing about the manager in this case.

“It’s different because we are different characters. It is about adapting to the things that they were doing before that. There were already some very good people working at Newcastle and so I want to keep them together.

“We cannot forget that this staff have won many things. I wouldn’t come in and challenge that, I want to compliment it and bring my own experiences but it is about working together. That is the main thing about this staff. We work together.”

For Antia, the job has seen him change gears. “In Qatar they are spending lots and lots of money to get themselves to the 2022 World Cup and trying to get the best football players that they can. The difference now is that I am working for a club that demands to us success. It’s not thinking in the long-term like they were at Aspire.

“My job there was to develop one player who can be a star for them at the 2022 World Cup. Here we need to win games: it’s totally different.”