In the context of Liverpool’s appalling season, yesterday’s point at Stoke may ultimately prove about as beneficial as a blood transfusion to a corpse. They will feel at the mercy of a malign destiny after having been denied a glaring first-half penalty at the Britannia stadium, taken the lead in the 57th minute and held it until the last seconds of regular time and then been mortified to find Dirk Kuyt lunging to head the ball against a post with the goal yawning like a cave during the lengthy period allowed for stoppages.
But even when weakened by the absence through injury of Steven Gerrard, Fernando Torres and Yossi Benayoun they should have demonstrated a more decisive superiority over opponents whose admirably combative vigour was backed by so little creativity that their attacking options were drastically reduced once the long-throw specialist Rory Delap had to go off hurt with barely a quarter of the match played.
Liverpool competed with far more spirit than they have tended to display lately, and they provided most of the controlled passing and inventiveness contained in the 95 minutes of largely dishevelled, frequently aerial action, but their recent traumas infected their defending with an unsurprising nervousness when Stoke mounted hectic late pressure.
Suddenly Liverpool were again sadly recognisable as the ill-integrated, unconfident collection of players who have found winning such a struggle throughout a 2009-10 campaign that they have now dropped more Premier League points than they did in the whole of last season, when they were runners-up in the title race. That they have declined so calamitously from the 2008-09 standard, instead of building on what was the best performance achieved in the domestic championship under the management of Rafael Benitez, has raised the questioning of the Spaniard’s right to keep his job from the disgruntled murmuring of previous years to a level of noisy but rational complaint.
As Liverpool have lurched and stumbled their way out of the major cup competitions of England and Europe and into the predicament of scrabbling to sustain fragile belief in their ability to finish as high as fourth in the Premier League (and thus guarantee entry to the Champions League), isolated hints of recovered effectiveness have been swiftly exposed as illusory. Remembering how the 2-0 defeat of Manchester United in October was immediately followed by submissions to Arsenal and Fulham and then a run of three laboured draws, and how the tentative hopes of improved fortunes encouraged by an away victory over persuasively aspiring Aston Villa at the end of December humiliatingly foundered in last week’s expulsion from the FA Cup by Reading at Anfield, it is difficult to imagine we’ll soon be witnessing a genuine restoration of formidability to the club who once ruled British football imperiously.
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And it’s even more of a stretch to argue that there is justification for further tolerance of the methods of the man who has steered Liverpool into their present miseries. Benitez’s avoidance of a bleak reckoning already qualifies as one of the more remarkable tales of managerial survival English football has known. Anybody who thinks that assessment is exaggerated should consider what attitudes to Sir Alex Ferguson’s position would be if Manchester United’s past few seasons had resembled those delivered by Benitez — and culminated in a 2009-10 campaign as prematurely bereft of lofty ambitions as is that of Liverpool. Wouldn’t there be grumbling demands, perhaps rising to a clamour, for the great Scot to be pensioned off?
Some might say a fairer comparison would be with Arsenal’s comfortable acceptance of four trophyless seasons from Arsène Wenger, perhaps adding that Wenger’s earlier feat of having thrice captured the championship of England’s top division that has eluded Liverpool for two decades shouldn’t count for more than Benitez’s success in the Champions League final of 2005. To me that is a dubious contention and it is, in any case, less relevant than vital differences to be discerned between the work done in this country by the Frenchman and by the Spaniard. Whereas Wenger (with much more modest expenditure than his Merseyside counterpart) has constructed a series of teams on unmistakably coherent principles, Benitez, for all his scientific theorising, has conspicuously failed to do so.
Though Arsenal have suffered intermittent losses of potency, often traceable to shortage of physical authority, they have generally been capable of fluently penetrative and sometimes beautiful football liable to trouble the best of opposition. In contrast, Liverpool have shown no convincing evidence of progressing from Benitez’s first season in charge, when glory was thrillingly, if rather freakishly, accomplished in Istanbul. Since that unforgettable night he has guided them to another appearance in the final of Europe’s greatest club tournament but there have been many blemishes to set against those continental triumphs, notably a prolonged addiction to extravagant rotation of individuals in his selections and a penchant for buying ill-advisedly.
Players have been recruited in droves and even the prodigious coup that brought Torres to Anfield cannot be seen as outweighing the plethora of inadequates Benitez has acquired. While estimates of his net spend on transfers vary widely, putting it on the far side of £100m is probably safe, and safer still is the conclusion that his dealings have left him lamentably short of value for money. These days the warm affection for him implanted in the Liverpool supporters by his enhancement of their beloved European tradition must be seeping away and the faithful on the Kop are surely having ever-increasing problems in reassuring themselves that all their current woes are attributable to the squabbling and misdeeds of American owners. Perhaps their indulgence of Rafa began to erode when he asserted that his record was impressive enough to be spared anything as banal as judgment according to trophies won.
Yet the signs continue to suggest that Rafa’s regime will be harder to terminate than Rasputin. Given that he occasionally behaves with the haughtiness of a Spanish grandee, it is tempting to think of him as some kind of Teflon Don. But names such as Guus Hiddink and Jose Mourinho may soon affect his future.