THIS week’s locking of horns between Rafa Benitez and Sergio Ramos is a classic tussle – between method and maverick.

Madrid’s iconic centre-half and captain played in Sunday’s derby against Atlético although not fully fit – he’s now absent from Spain’s international matches – and back early from injury.

“It was a four-week recovery time and I played after two because of the game’s importance,” Ramos revealed while sniping back at his manager.

“I’m not asking for a bravery medal, just explaining what I chose to do.”

Los Blancos led 1-0 but in the 21st minute Ramos tried a risky pass deep in his own half, saw it cut off by Ángel Correa and although the original Atleti attack was repelled, when the ball broke to Tiago in the box Ramos, obviously over-compensating for his error, lunged in and committed a penalty.

Keylor Navas duly saved it but the match nevertheless ended in a draw and post-match Benitez did a long interview on the radio for the major-audience El Larguero (Crossbar) show.

During it he griped: “At half-time we talked about precisely this kind of move because Atleti feed off any kind of errors by their opposition, which is why I was so p****d off with Ramos because he didn’t need to try a pass with such unnecessary risk.”

While withdrawing from the Spain squad the next day Ramos, wonderfully trigger-happy when he feels slighted, bit back. Hard.

“Instead of talking about that mistake perhaps we can talk about the coach’s substitutions (he took off top scorer Benzema, again) or the fact that we didn’t have the initiative to push forward and win it at 1-0 instead of then sitting back in the second half.”

Knife inserted between ribs, metaphorically speaking.

Anyone who followed the often uneasy, recently public, lack of feeling between Rafa the Red and Stevie Gerrard will recognise this situation.

It’s hugely similar.

Back then, Benitez liked Gerrard’s talent, technique and leadership.

But it’s in-built in the Spaniard’s meticulous, microscopic attention-to-detail character that football be played systematically – by clear, definable, assessable rules.

He frets about the maverick.

The guy who improvises, invents, risks and carries the beauty of football with him.

Gerrard did it for Liverpool – producing moments of magic during which he popped up to, occasionally, cause as much surprise and consternation in his own manager as in the opposing teams.

Because playing like that carries with it the accentuated threat of something going wrong.

All elite football carries that risk – last season Andrés Iniesta pirouetted and spiralled past a series of Paris St Germain players erupting from near the edge of his own box to create a goal for Neymar.

It was stellar, and I asked him about it after the match.

Iniesta admitted that his little sparks of creative invention, if thwarted and picked off, can leave his team exposed.

As if the wind catches your kilt on a day when you’ve gone to a wedding as a true Scot. Posterior exposed is the polite expression.

That night he told me: “It was a very fast piece of play involving lots of improvisation – making decisions in thousandths of a second, practically all of which happened to be the right ones.

“Decisive moments, whether you get them right or wrong come down to split seconds.

“There’s very little time to think. Either you pull off the piece of play visualised in your head or your opponents nick the ball off you.”

Some managers understand and nurture that type of player.

They’ll accept the risk of being turned over and even scored against in exchange for the treble possibility of scoring, winning and entertaining.

Others, like Benitez, believe that exerting an iron-like grip on risk-minimisation, on playing systematic football and on when their more talented players are allowed moments of creative invention is the only secure way to win.

They don’t want to extinguish anarchic, explosive invention – they just want it to happen as far as possible from their own goalmouth.

While Benitez and, say, Pep Guardiola are fundamentally different in the key approaches to football, the basics of what they believe in are not so different.

Until it comes to risk.

They both believe in a playing system or philosophy, they hone it until it is cutting edge, they enforce it on their squad, whip them into comprehension and obedience – but above all make it clear what is and what is NOT allowed.

So, Guardiola wants his defenders to bring the ball out from the back and take risks – similar to the one Ramos got in trouble for – within a strict system, so there are back-up rescue facilities. There are unbreakable rules about how far apart three players are ever permitted to be in such situations – 10 metres maximum.

The risk-analysis which is fundamental to Pep is that if his defenders break through the first line of pressing by opposition strikers, they will then move forward and have numerical superiority in midfield when added to the side’s existing midfielders.

That is Nirvana for Guardiola.

Risk accepting, but also risk-managing because of those strict rules about how to build that move from the back when a defender will try to go one v one with his pressing opponent.

Benitez doesn’t want that.

He’d rather that defenders, like Ramos, either unload, to an unmarked midfielder who drops deep; sidewards to the other central defender; passes long or uses the keeper when he finds himself pressed.

On Sunday, Ramos probably did take too much of a risk with a pass that Atleti actually wanted him to play – too much of a risk in that his team-mates weren’t properly positioned in order to support him if he got in trouble.

But there was another big risk in this affair. Benitez needed to phone his captain on Tuesday to try to calm the sudden eruption of tit-for-tat comments between them.

Karim Benzema is already miffed with his Spanish coach for constantly being substituted despite seven goals in eight games.

The Madrid media are getting a little sniffy about the kind of play they are watching from Los Blancos under Rafa. Headlines on Monday implied that, at 1-0, he bottled it and wanted to hold on rather than go for the throat.

So whether Rafa really needed to poke a sleeping tiger like Ramos with a sharp stick is something he may reflect on now that he has removed the teeth and claws from his leg.

These rules not fit for purpose

TURAN or not Turan, that is the question.

Believe me, if I’m forced into quoting Shakespeare, whose work I can’t abide, then it must have reached the stage that FIFA are doing Barça an injustice.

Your primer on this subject is that FIFA impose rules about when, and under what circumstances, young kids can and can’t move countries or continents simply because they are talented at football.

Barcelona broke those rules.

The law was already something of an ass because the European champions do excel in the sporting, scholastic and social care of talented young kids in their academy.

The rules were meant for unscrupulous clubs or academies who’d take a promising 13 or 14-year-old from, usually, a poor or uneducated background to another country or continent but then discard him, without care or responsibility if he proved not to have top flight senior football in him.

Rules being rules, Barcelona earned their punishment (of not being able to field new signings until January 2016) as you can’t blindly ignore the law simply because you’re quite sure it wasn’t designed to inhibit you specifically. It’s like saying: “Jenson Button and Lewis Hamilton should be allowed to drive at 150mph on the open roads whenever they like because … they really are VERY good behind the wheel!”

But Barcelona are down to the bare bones because of a flood of injuries.

The Spanish League and FA have a long-standing provision that if one of your nominated squad players is injured and out for the season (the case with Rafinha) then you can acquire a replacement.

Last week at Sevilla the Spanish champions had only 15 fully fit outfield first team players. Barcelona want to play Arda Turan, pictured, bought from Atletico but not available until January, immediately.

It’s both fair that they should be permitted this and, manifestly, outwith the spirit of their ban if Barcelona are forced to begin to take the risk of playing and damaging 90% fit footballers in order to compensate for long-term injured team-mates.