Football press conferences are usually quite predictable affairs with the manager trotting out the usual clichés and obfuscation in response to the same old questions from the press.

They are rarely places to deploy an extended metaphor but someone must have forgotten to tell Rafa Benitez because his latest comments about his time at Liverpool read more like T.S. Eliot on acid.

“We have a saying in Spanish….’white liquid in a bottle has to be milk’. He quipped to a presumably puzzled press corp. Yes, it’s likely to be milk, more likely than it is to be paint, but ….well…so what?”

He went on.

“So, white liquid in a bottle: milk. You will know who is to blame.”

Errr…..right. So who is to blame for the milk in the bottle? Is it the dairy that put it in the bottle? The manufacturer of the glass bottle, after all there’s no milk bottle without the bottle. Or is it the farmer who milked the cow or perhaps it’s all the fault of the cow for lactating in the first place? Christ, this is exhausting.

So that’s our options of who to blame, now which of them is Hicks and Gillett? Is he saying they are a couple of big cows having their udders pulled or is Liverpool the cow who is being milked? If so, who is the milker and where is the milk going?

Man, it’s like peeling an onion trying to understand this. Excuse me while I take some psychotropic drugs to try and understand this cryptic metaphor. It’s like something out of Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance.

But he wasn’t done with the milky goodness yet. Oh no,

“White liquid in a bottle. If I see John the milkman in the Wirral, where I was living, with this bottle, I’d say, ‘It’s milk, sure’.”

Yeeeesssss….of course Rafa; now let’s take a little walk with these nice men in white coats.

It’s all as clear as…well, as clear as milk, as it turns out. I’m sure John knows its milk in his bottle and is not likely to ask Rafa to tell him what it is.

Even Cantona’s infamous seagulls following trawlers was a relatively straightforward analogy compared to this.

I’m sure ‘White liquid in a bottle: milk;’ would be a great slogan for the dairy industry. As a way to describe his time at Liverpool it is somewhat more opaque.

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