Yossi Benayoun is ready to bide his time and prove his worth at Chelsea. Yossi Benayoun has already demonstrated his dry wit at Chelsea. The requirement for the club’s new signings to sing a song in front of the assembled first-team squad has become something of a rite of passage, but the Israeli’s selection was always going to be drowned out.
“I started with You’ll Never Walk Alone,” said the midfielder, the £6m signing from Liverpool. “They stopped me in the middle and so I moved into a song in Hebrew, my language, so it was OK.”
Yossi Benayoun spent three seasons at Anfield but the parting, because of a falling-out with the former manager Rafael Benítez, was cloaked in acrimony. Benayoun said Benítez had driven him from the club and tried “to destroy my confidence, to break me”.
The 30-year-old is determined to look ahead to his new challenge, to prove his qualities to his Stamford Bridge team-mates and win the battle to establish himself in Carlo Ancelotti’s first team. With the club poised to complete the £18m (€22m) signing of another midfielder, the Brazil international Ramires from Benfica, it will not be easy. But Benayoun is determined to put the memory of a nightmarish season behind him and enjoy liberation back in London, where he began his career in England with West Ham in 2005.
