Sitting in a changing room at Aston Villa’s training ground, Christian Benteke is trying to explain the secret behind his spectacular return to form. Or, to put it another way, how a striker can go from scoring twice in the Premier League this season at an average of one every 10 hours, to racking up more goals in the past six weeks than anyone else in the top flight.
It has been one hell of a transformation, with Benteke racing into double figures for the season in the blink of an eye and playing with such confidence that when Villa were trailing 3-2 at home against Queens Park Rangers last week, the 24-year‑old felt compelled to do something he had done only once before in English football: take a free-kick. The result was a stunning 25-yard curling shot that went in off the near upright to complete his hat-trick and rescue a precious point. “I surprised myself!” Benteke says, laughing, before openly admitting that he never practises free-kicks.
Benteke, in short, has got his mojo back. As he prepares for Sunday’s FA Cup semi-final against Liverpool, he looks and sounds like a man who is once again enjoying his football, which was not the case towards the end of Paul Lambert’s reign as manager, when the Belgium international was starved of service, the goals had dried up and he ended up being dropped for the final two matches of the Scot’s reign.
“It was frustrating,” Benteke says. “Every time after the game I said to myself: ‘I can do better.’ It was frustrating to play a game with no chances, so I go back home with two feelings, because I’m happy because I can play without being injured, but frustration because I have no chances.”
The injury Benteke is referring to is that cruelly timed ruptured achilles tendon he suffered last April, which shattered his hopes of playing in Brazil and forced him to watch Belgium’s first appearance in a World Cup finals for 12 years from a sofa in Liège. Benteke explains that it has taken time to regain full fitness since returning to the Villa side at the start of October and talks about how much easier it is now that he playing without pain, yet he also knows that his improved physical condition is only part of the story behind his renaissance.
The centre-forward who secured Villa a draw against QPR single-handed and four days later scored the winner at White Hart Lane, in last Saturday’s crucial 1-0 victory over Tottenham Hotspur, has been liberated ever since Tim Sherwood took over as manager and talked about “taking the shackles” off a group of players whose confidence was shot to bits. Villa, whose goal return under Lambert was pitiful, are now playing with much more penetration and Benteke has reaped the rewards.
“It is not just about scoring,” Benteke says. “I am happy to score but I am also happy because now I play how I want to play. I think maybe before [Sherwood] came he saw that we needed to play more straight, more forward, because even if I didn’t score we didn’t shoot a lot at the target, we didn’t score a lot also, so now it’s a bit different.”
Sherwood thought from day one that playing to the Belgian’s strengths was the key to turning Villa’s fortunes around. “The thing is, he has given me a lot of freedom, a lot of responsibility, and he has said to the other lads to play maybe more direct with me,” the Belgian says. “When a manager says that, you feel more important, more responsible.”
Benteke has no desire to give Lambert a kicking. He will always be grateful to Villa’s former manager for taking a leap of faith and signing him from Genk for £7m in 2012, when other English clubs stalled. By the same token, he knows that Villa under Lambert were in a damaging downward spiral that threatened to end in relegation. So was a change of manager needed? “That’s a tough question,” Benteke says. “I will say yes because the confidence of the team was a little bit low and when [Sherwood] came he brought the confidence up.”
Benteke’s own self-belief has never been lacking. He is a softly spoken giant of a man but there is a fierce determination that burns inside and he has not forgotten how people at Genk and Standard Liège, two of his former clubs, doubted he would be able to cut it in the Premier League. “Before I came here, they said I wasn’t ready because the level between Belgium and England is really high and I should stay one more season in Belgium. But I said: ‘No, I am confident, I want to go.’ So that’s why I don’t really listen to what people say. If I feel it, I just do it.”
The 23 goals he scored for Villa in his first season at the club, including 19 in the Premier League, put to bed the argument about whether that move came too soon and also formed the basis of the one-on-one conversation Sherwood held with Benteke shortly after taking over. Benteke smiles when it is put to him that it must have felt good to hear Sherwood telling him all the leading clubs were pursuing him after that prolific first season. “Yeah. But, to be fair, I know that I’m a good player,” he says. “It’s just I have to show it.”
Brazil would have been the perfect stage but that achilles injury deprived Benteke of the chance and he politely declined an invitation from Belgium’s manager to go along with the rest of the squad, preferring to return to Liège and spend some time with his parents. “I spoke with Marc Wilmots, he said: ‘If you want you can come with the lads,’ but I didn’t want to,” Benteke says.
“Watching the first World Cup game was hard. Normally I have to be there with the team-mates and now I am in the living room like a fan, watching TV. I worked hard for that opportunity [to play in a World Cup]. But that’s life. It was tough but the fact that I came back to Belgium with my family helped get me through it. They were like: ‘OK, it is part of life.’ My mum said you have to be thankful to God because it could have been worse. Even me, I didn’t really understand why she was saying that but you have to deal with it and go forward.”
The arrival of his son, Jaden, in September, was a welcome distraction at a time when he was still sidelined and a first appearance at Wembley seven months later – he was an unused substitute when Belgium lost to England there in June 2012 – gives Benteke the chance to finish the season with a flourish and possibly bring some silverware and European football back to Villa Park. “I think this is the beauty of the FA Cup,” Benteke says. “For these two games, everything is possible.”
Whether Benteke will be at Villa next season remains to be seen. He will have only two years left on his contract in the summer and there will be no shortage of interest in a player who has scored 39 Premier League goals during three successive relegation battles. “I don’t know,” says Benteke, when asked about his future. “The first thing I want is to be safe and then go on holiday, because it is a long time since I’ve had a holiday. After that, we will see what happens.”
