When he recalls Liverpool’s famous comeback in Istanbul in 2005, Mauricio Pellegrino says he will never forget how his mentor Rafael Benitez tore up two weeks of Champions League final preparation in a few minutes – a triumph, the new Southampton manager says, of managerial “imagination”.

Pellegrino, giving his first major interview since being appointed, was a Liverpool player back then, cup-tied for the Champions League and watching from the stands as his team fell three goals behind AC Milan. At half-time he decided that the only appropriate course of action as respite from the catastrophe unfolding on the pitch was to have a beer, and he was in the bar when Steven Gerrard scored Liverpool’s first, prompting him to rush back to his seat.

“We were 15 days preparing the final, preparing how we press, how we attack, set pieces and in 30 minutes they killed us,” Pellegrino says. “And Rafa changed everything. For this reason there is something more important than organisation and planning - it is imagination. He changed everything.

“We played with three defenders! We never played with three defenders before but we had to control [Hernan] Crespo and [Andrei] Shevchenko better and maybe it allowed us to be stronger in the middle. We played 3-4-3 and we scored three goals and then we changed again and Steven Gerrard played at full back.”