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Reader question: What does this headline – Rafa Benitez (the Liverpool football club manager) has lost the plot – mean? What plot? Football strategies? My comments: Football strategies, yes, and perhaps more, such as rotations (who plays when and for how long), and people management (keeping players happy and motivated), and perhaps even suggesting that Benitez is mad (metaphorically speaking) – because not very long ago, the Liverpool manager launched an unprovoked attack on Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United helmsman, accusing the latter of influencing referees by talking to them during halftime breaks. I believe that headline was getting at this. Anyways, accusations such as these are deemed wild and off the mark, far-fetched and unfounded, and they appeared to suggest that the Liverpool head coach has lost his cool (composure). Perhaps the pressure of winning (or not winning to be exact - Liverpool has not won a league title in two decades or close to it) has got into his head and he does not always make sense when it comes to talking about matches and titles. Ah well, “lost the plot” is the idiom in question here, lest we forget. “Plot” refers to connections between events in a story, play or movie. If the novelist loses the plot in the middle of writing a novel, you can imagine what will happen – the story will cease to hold water. It is the same as saying someone has “lost his script”. Now imagine some actor losing the script on stage in the middle of a play. Not that they would lose the paper sheets themselves (though some might do even that), but that they’ve forgotten their lines – they won’t know when to say what. Disaster to be sure. | 
