IN-DEMAND POC A SPURS-UNITED
on Benitez’s most formidable group – more balanced and more consistent than his improbable 2005 Champions League winners – may be that they were the right team at the wrong time.
While Klopp’s Liverpool are taking on Pep Guardiola’s Manchester City, Benitez’s Reds fought Sir Alex Ferguson’s United. They beat them twice. They won the battles, but not the war. They were the Christmas No1. They ended the season second.
They were one of the best teams never to win the league, the first to only lose two games and not become champions. They took 86 points. “In most years it would have been enough to win the title,” Benitez noted in his book Champions League Dreams. Now Klopp’s Liverpool are on course for 101.
But even that may not be enough against a
City side who got 100 last year. Benitez’s Liverpool peaked at a point when standards were sky high. “We failed by the slenderest of margins,” the Spaniard lamented. Draws cost them more than defeats. They finished the season in storming style but dropped too many points in January and February.
“I still think that team should have won the league under Rafa Benitez,” Gerrard wrote in his autobiography.
It is different now. Liverpool now have greater harmony off the field and more strength in-depth on it.
They fell apart after they sold Xabi Alonso in the summer of 2009. They seem built to last now.
But Liverpool could scale heights few teams have reached and still come second to an even greater side from Manchester.