Benítez surprised Kewell went into management

Rafael Benitez has written an article in which he has revealed he was surprised when Harry Kewell, who he coached at Liverpool, went into management after his playing career.

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Benitez, writing for The Athletic, discussed which players he had coached that he thought would become future mangers. 

Kewell and Benitez worked together at Liverpool from 2004 until 2008, but the Spaniard said he got "no indication" that the Australian would move into coaching. 

"Harry Kewell was a really good player who was unlucky with injuries but he didn’t talk about games very much or about football in general and I would not have said he felt like an obvious choice to be a manager," Benitez wrote. 

"With others, you could just see it. Sami Hyypia and Xabi Alonso, for example, would ask us about football and tactics and talk about our training sessions and things like that." 

Kewell started coaching Watford's under-21 side in 2015 before moving on to League Two club Crawley Town in 2017 and then later in 2018 taking over Notts County. 

While the Notts County job did not last long - Kewell was sacked after 14 games in charge - it is understood that the former Socceroos winger is still keen to be a manager. 

Many of Benitez's former players have gone into coaching including Steven Gerrard, Kewell's teammate at Liverpool, who is now in charge at Scottish club Rangers.

"With some of the players we have worked with, it is very clear from the start — you know they will stay involved in football in some capacity, either as a coach or a manager. With Steven Gerrard, I honestly did not know," Benitez wrote. 

"Stevie stayed at Anfield, we were together for six years and you could see that every year he was learning a bit more and his understanding of the game was becoming a little better.

"He and Carra (Jamie Carragher) were close and Carra liked to talk about Juventus or Barcelona or Real Madrid.

"It’s not like Stevie took notes or anything but when you work under a lot of different coaches from different nationalities, you learn and he was clever enough to soak information up.

"With Mauricio Pellegrino, it was just obvious. He played for us at Valencia and then Liverpool, and he always took a keen interest in what we were trying to do and why.

"You could see how important it was to him, how much he wanted to learn. He came back to Liverpool to work as a coach and then moved with us to Inter Milan before becoming a manager in his own right at Valencia and, amongst others, Southampton and now Leganes."