Benitez will have learned valuable lesson

Andrew Fifield On The Premiership: Rafael Benitez has experienced some exhilarating highs in his short but seismic reign as Liverpool manager, but now he has to stomach his most agonising low. To lose in the dying minutes is always painful, but the pangs are even more potent when it happens in the back yard of your greatest rival, so when Rio Ferdinand's turbo-charged header arrowed into the top corner of Liverpool's net yesterday, Benitez could be excused for feeling as if a knife had just been plunged into his guts.

Liverpool's pain was as acute as Manchester United's pleasure last night, but though it will take time for Benitez to exorcise the memory of defeat, there is no reason to suspect that United's fortuitous victory at Old Trafford represents a turning point in the fortunes of either club.

Nobody knows this better than Alex Ferguson. The Scot is notoriously reluctant to bestow rivalry status on any of Manchester United's peers, but with Liverpool he is happy to make an exception. His brief when he took control at Old Trafford in 1986 was to smash the Mersey monopoly on silverware and that intensity has not diminished, even though it is now almost 16 years since the league title was whisked down the East Lancashire road.

But there was more than just old grudges to settle yesterday. Ferguson may not care to admit it, but while his own club has spent much of this season stuck in a tailspin, Anfield's Liver birds have rediscovered their strut.

Benitez' teams have always possessed a steely determination - no better exemplified than in Istanbul last May when he won the Champions League - but now Liverpool have the swagger which is the trademark of champion sides.

The catalyst of their transformation is Benitez. His arrival in England coincided with Jose Mourinho's appointment at Chelsea, but it is difficult to imagine two more contrasting characters.

Mourinho can be surly and affable at a stroke. He is capable of talking openly and engagingly about everything from football to family life, and has comic timing which will serve him well on the after-dinner speaking circuit when he finally decides to hang up his overcoat.

Yet it is now several months since Mourinho gave a press conference, his patience worn thin by the methods and machinations of the English tabloid press.

Benitez would baulk at the notion of ever throwing a toddler's tantrum with the media, but then again the former Valencia manager's mood hardly ever seems to shift from sanguine, regardless of whether he is confronting triumph or disaster.

Even last night, as he picked through the wreckage of defeat, he reacted with a mere shrug of those heavy shoulders and a few words of quiet regret.

The Spaniard's enigmatic personality is virtually impossible to read from the outside, but he has built a side in his own composed image. Liverpool were mostly unflustered yesterday. They were snappy in the tackle, diligent on the ball and never allowed the game's rhythm to accelerate beyond slip-jig pace. Even Harry Kewell, the Australian winger who seemed to have developed a sweat allergy soon after joining from Leeds, was tracking back, closing down and generally doing all the things that can reasonably be expected of a man earning £60,000 a week.

The only thing that was lacking was a finish, and had Ferdinand not been in inspired form - at both ends of the pitch - Liverpool's travelling band would surely have been trumpeting a famous victory rather than a demoralising defeat. But the England defender's dramatic late winner is proof that Benitez's Liverpool is a work in progress rather than the finished article.

Even with a rejuvenated Crouch, he still lacks a forward with the predator's instinct. Djibril Cisse is a mercurial talent, but that is football-speak for loose cannon. The Frenchman can score chances which would make other strikers shrink, but his misses are sometimes just as spectacular. His blunder early in the second half yesterday, when he spooned a volley over the bar from six yards with the goal gaping, was truly wretched.

Perhaps Benitez, too, has something to learn. As Liverpool inched nearer to securing a valuable away point, so they grew more tentative, more timid. Having made United dance to their tune, they suddenly found the conductor's baton wrested from them and it was then that Benitez needed to act, to rejig his side's shape or introduce a destructive player - Djimi Traore, perhaps - who could stymie United in midfield.

Instead, Liverpool retreated frantically towards their own goal before they were floored by Ferdinand's sucker-punch.

That blow will sting this morning, just as it ached last night, but before Liverpool's supporters throw themselves en masse into the Mersey, they should remember who dominated at Old Trafford for 89 minutes, and who are the reigning European champions. Benitez will not panic, and neither should they.