In interviews there is an endearing absence of bombast, and often the equivalent of a philosophical shrug in the Spanish cadences of his English answers. His demeanour is devoid of any hint of swagger. Yet what he has been doing at Liverpool suggests that as a manager Rafael Benitez has an ego a circus tent couldn’t cover. His engaging persona encouraged many to cling, perhaps longer than they should have done, to the view that the stubborn arbitrariness of his methods reflected admirable independence of thought, legitimate self-belief nourished by success in the top league of his home-land and in cup competitions since he moved to Merseyside in the summer of 2004. That interpretation, however, has become unsustainable. The extremist version of rotation policy he applies to team selection has spun so far towards indefensible eccentricity that his continued insistence on preaching it as unchallengeable gospel amounts to an exposure of vanity, of the inviolable conviction that his reasoning is never wrong.

When failure comes, as it did with the dullest of clunks in the 1-0 Champions League loss to Marseille at Anfield on Wednesday, his explanations tend effortlessly to eschew admissions of his own culpability.

Few managers are keen on accusing themselves at the inquest on such a shocking result but fewer still are as eager to blame their players as Benitez was after Liverpool had been comprehensively dominated by opponents whose unlikely springboard for the upset was a fourth-from-bottom position in the French league. Now Liverpool have only one point from an available six in Champions League group action and even a resounding Premier League victory over Tottenham today may not quell sour questioning among the faithful.

Benitez undoubtedly had grounds for lamenting the gulf between reputations and performances in midweek, for criticising the passivity with which his men allowed themselves to be second to just about every ball, betraying a miserable lack of individual assertiveness and integrated morale. But didn’t it occur to him that those shortcomings might be related to the uncertainties bred by his refusal to recognise the term team as signifying anything more than whichever 11 names he chooses as his starters?

That his endless permutations jar the sensibilities of lavishly paid footballers is hardly in itself a cause for complaint. Readiness to let the millionaires in studded boots know who is the boss should be a prerequisite of taking charge of a major club. Unfortunately, the line Benitez obliges his men to toe seems too frequently to trace an incoherent, impractical and ultimately self-defeating pattern. The impression conveyed is of a regrettable triumph of convoluted theory over established realities. Specifically, Benitez appears intent on belittling the traditional concept of team-building, the well-tested principle that, having painstakingly identified a group of exceptional and complementary talents, a manager gains much by developing them as a regularly functioning unit, providing sufficient experience of playing together to engender psychological cohesion, mutual trust and a honed coordination in the execution of their skills.

Every truly great team in the history of the game grew from that foundation. No squad, however expensive or carefully recruited, can have a democracy of abilities. There must be an elite and it makes sense to field that elite as often as possible, using the depth of the squad to compensate for loss of form, of fitness or of competitive edge by the best players.

It is impossible to associate that approach with Benitez’s habit of transforming his starting lineup for match after match. If we list the number of personnel changes he has made between one game and the next through the first dozen fixtures of this season, the sequence of figures is remarkable: 6, 6, 4, 7, 5, 5, 6, 2, 9, 7, 5. Those statistics make it difficult to take seriously apologists’ claims that he is merely showing us a rational extension of the commitment to rotation long evident at all leading clubs.

Naturally enough, his justification for the incessant juggling is that he is picking players to suit particular assignments and, above all, that he is husbanding his resources in the interests of a long-term, trophy-winning strategy. Nobody can question his right to talk as a high achiever. He lifted two La Liga championships with Valencia and, in addition to collecting the FA Cup for Liverpool, he has put them in two Champions League finals, one of which was unforgettably won in Istanbul three years ago (albeit after a penalty shootout settled an utterly freakish match in which Liverpool were superior to Milan for no more than 15 minutes of the two hours played). But even those achievements won’t convince everybody that the scale of his good husbandry obsession is a strength. It is, presumably, inseparable from the blitz of data currently assuring us that modern footballers are subjected to demands beyond the imaginings of previous generations.

Plainly the game is faster and more athletic (if not necessarily better) than ever before but some of the claims advanced are weird. Twelve months back we were told ProZone analysis revealed that in 2005-6 the amount of “high-intensity activities” performed by Premiership players was almost double what it had been just four seasons earlier. That finding has an impressive pseudo-scientific ring but what the hell does it really mean? A doubling of intensity in four seasons? Like me, you may have missed that. Maybe we were looking out for something more probable at the time, like the arrival of a flying saucer.

Rose thrived on foreign fields

When the footballers who successfully defended the Women’s World Cup for Germany arrived back from Shanghai last week they were given a clamorous welcome by 15,000 fans in the main square of Frankfurt. The girls deserved no less after they had beaten Brazil 2-0 in the final with a performance calculated to stir even a nation accustomed to winning football’s biggest prizes. But talented though the German team undoubtedly are, it is unlikely that they have in their ranks a player whose abilities or achievements wouldn’t be dwarfed by those once identified with a middle-aged mother to be found these days in the small town of Stewarton in Ayrshire. Rose Reilly must be one of Britain's most undercelebrated sporting heroines. It was with the Stewarton club that Rose first showed how exceptional she could be on the football field. She was such a prodigy that by the age of 17 she had made 10 appearances for the Scotland women’s team and was ready to emigrate into the demanding environment of European professionalism to exploit gifts that made her outstanding at the highest level of the female game as both a striker and a midfielder.

Having started playing in France for Reims (helping them to capture a league title), she then sent her career into a spectacular upward surge by joining AC Milan.

During her time in Italy, which embraced service not only with Milan but with Catania, Lecce, Trani, Napoli, Fiorentina and Bari, she was prominent in the winning of eight Serie A titles and four Italian Cups and twice earned the Golden Boot in Serie A. At her zenith in 1983, she captained Italy in the Women’s World Cup and scored one of the goals as the Azzurri defeated the USA to claim the championship trophy in front of a 90,000 crowd at China’s National Stadium. It was in that year that she was voted the best female footballer on the planet.

Her life outside football also developed in Italy, and not without more than a hint of the remarkable. Having married Norberto Peralta, an Argentine sports doctor, Rose gave birth to their daughter Meghan when she was 45. The family moved back to Stewarton to look after Rose’s mother after she had a stroke in 2001and they are still settled there. Perhaps this Ayrshireman can be forgiven a slight swelling of pride at the thought that such a 52-year-old marvel is living quietly half-a-dozen miles from where I was born.

Go for the safe bet

Forecasts suggest there will be a crowd of around 40,000 at Longchamp today for the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe and that approximately half of them will be British.

Of course, that latter contingent could be reinforced if Scottish rugby supporters, hungry for a success to celebrate after England’s improbable World Cup triumph over Australia, decide they have more chance of finding an excuse for a party in the Bois de Boulogne than when their team meet Argentina later in the day.

Their men are rank outsiders against the Pumas, so it might be sensible to seek consolation in advance by bombarding the betting windows with support for this afternoon’s short-priced favourite, the Epsom Derby winner Authorised.