Amazing, but let's not be fooled

Champions League 2005/Follow-up: Former Liverpool legend Mark Lawrenson argues that the European champions are far from the finished article.

There I was, sitting in the stadium in Istanbul at half-time, and thinking what those thousands of Liverpool supporters around me were probably thinking . . . let's get out of here as quick as we can. I'd imagine that's how the team felt too. The second half was just going to be about damage limitation. Restoring some pride. Trying to avoid humiliation. Then leg it to the airport and get home.

What followed? Well, the best, the most astonishing comeback I have ever, ever seen. Staggering.

From getting it so spectacularly wrong Rafael Benitez managed to get it spectacularly right. I would give anything to know what he said to them at half-time - talk about inspirational.

And what makes it even more amazing is you could not describe this Liverpool team as a great team, by any stretch of the imagination.

In fact, if you made those players available today to other clubs around Europe there really wouldn't be too many takers.

So, if you had said to me a few months ago that Liverpool would have a night like that, would win the European Cup for the fifth time, I would have laughed. Out loud. I didn't expect them to go far in the competition, certainly not to get past Juventus, and positively not to win it.

In the middle of it all I couldn't help but think of Michael Owen. At half-time he must have said "What a good decision I made leaving Liverpool". By the end of it I'm sure it was: "Crikey - how did that happen?". Which is kind of how I felt too.

How did that happen? When we won it 20 odd years ago - is it really that long? - we had a very, very good team. I can't say we were expected to win it, but every one knew we had a chance. We had the players, we had the experience, we had the pedigree, I suppose.

But I don't think even the most blind of Liverpool supporters could have felt that way about this team. Even now, regardless of what happened on Wednesday night, they know they don't have a very, very good team.

How many of those players would you have in your first XI? Exactly, not many. We're talking about the Champions League and we're talking about a team that was beaten 14 times - 14 times! - in their own league this season. It's unheard of.

They beat Juventus, they beat Chelsea and they beat Milan along the way, so it was hardly an easy route. But, as fantastically well as they've done, they played those three teams at the right time, the right time for Liverpool and the wrong time, for various reasons, for the others. But when you win a cup competition that inevitably is what happens.

I'm really, really pleased for Benitez, I think everyone's delighted for him, not least because he seems to be a thoroughly nice man. In fairness to him, he never once moaned, unlike his predecessor, about his bad luck during the season, about being without Djibril Cisse, Xabi Alonso and others. He just got on with it. And he's earned respect for that.

And at least he had it in him to change everything at half-time after making a massive boo boo - and he does do that quite often in games, he will change it tactically; he's not rigid, not afraid to concede he got it wrong.

Picking Harry Kewell. Well, maybe Benitez just had too long to think about it. I don't know if he was trying to be too cute, maybe he saw it as his masterplan, one Milan wouldn't be able to cope with, but the opposite happened: Milan destroyed Liverpool in the first half.

By half-time he really had no option but to go for it, that was the key to the comeback, playing just three at the back and getting numbers in midfield. And everything changed spectacularly. Djimi Traore in the first half wouldn't have got a game as sub for The Dog and Duck, would he? But in fairness to him, he made two or three brilliant tackles in the second half and cleared one off the line - we were looking at a different person.

And Stevie Gerrard was transformed. In the first half he was anonymous, but that was because the system Benitez chose meant Gerrard was too busy putting out fires.

And Vladimir Smicer? The player with, arguably, the biggest yellow streak down his back you've ever seen, comes on and scores an outstanding goal. An absolutely extraordinary turn-around.

So will this signal a Liverpool revival, get them back to where they were in the 1970s and 1980s? Not with this team it won't.

Ecstatic and all as Liverpool supporters are I don't think there's any danger of them kidding themselves over this, that somehow they now have a team capable of challenging Chelsea, Arsenal and Manchester United - because they don't.

They know what they have and what they haven't got, this won't kid them.

With the players they've got at the moment I still wouldn't tip them to finish above Chelsea, Arsenal or United next season, I think those three teams are much better. Fourteen defeats in the Premiership? Really they need five, six new players, it's that drastic. And that's assuming that they'll keep Gerrard and that Alonso and Cisse are fit.

If they can get rid of him, Kewell will go somewhere, although at £65,000-plus a week and with three years left on his contract you're looking at bill of £10 million if you want to get rid of him. That's another problem Benitez has inherited, something else he has to deal with.

Milan Baros could go, Jerzy Dudek too. They need a proper left back instead of Traore, God bless him. There'll be lots and lots of changes, finances permitting, of course.

And winning the Champions League obviously improves things financially (and I'm convinced Uefa will find a place for Liverpool in next season's competition, they'll have to find a way). I would imagine it will make it easier to attract good players, and I think it will probably persuade Gerrard to stay. It's very difficult for him to leave now, he must surely feel there is something to build on. When there was initially talk of him leaving it was about him going somewhere where he could win the Champions League - well he's done it with Liverpool, the next objective is to be part of a team that can challenge in the Premiership.

It will be interesting to see in a year's time how many of this team are still involved at Liverpool. There'll be a lot of departures, but that speaks volumes for Benitez. He's won it with a couple of outstanding players, some good players and some average players.

In that sense what he has achieved rivals much of what went before him at Liverpool, when several of his predecessors assembled genuinely great teams that went on to have fantastic success. Rafa Benitez has won the Champions League with a team that finished 37 points behind this season's Premiership champions, Chelsea. That is amazing. But not half as amazing as the second half in Istanbul on Wednesday night.