Rafa Benitez talks transfers

Chelsea manager Rafa Benitez* spoke with the media after Chelsea's training session today ahead of Sunday's clash with league leading Manchester City. It was a relatively uneventful Q&A (especially by his standards), but he did have a comment that caught my eye.

*I still have to fight the urge to vomit when I type that

One of the major criticisms of Benitez has been his inability to correctly identify players that he could effectively utilize on the transfer market. He's had some excellent signings, and he's had a lot of very poor ones. He spoke today about future transfers and his role in that regard, suggesting that he understands that he's not in charge of the construction of the squad:

"It's a good squad, a good team. If I'm here, it's because I think we can win with them. If we can improve by training hard, we will. Here, you have a technical director and the manager is a head coach who has to improve the players he has. I will talk to the people involved if it's necessary to improve the squad."

This is excellent to hear coming out of his mouth, as his history doesn't make me comfortable with him having much of a say at all in regards to player acquisition. His contract does make it look as if he's only a stop-gap solution for Chelsea, so hopefully this means his input will be very, very minimal in this regard.

Hopefully the change will see a motivated squad take the pitch on Sunday, as the last few games have just been hard to watch. It would be nice to have something positive to write about for a change, the last few weeks have been rough for all of us.