Michael Walker meets the Liverpool centre-half who is looking forward to more trophies under his Spanish boss

Liverpool versus Manchester United: a fixture you can smell. Sami Hyypia sat back on his wooden chair and inhaled. "United's and our fans hate each other," he said, "and seeing the Liverpool players who are from Liverpool, always Man United games are the ones they look for first on the schedule. I've seen how important it is."

So tomorrow and January 21st will have been ringed on the Anfield calendar. The squeamish can look away.

Someone like Hyypia plays with his face to the game and is always keen to look forward. This is the 6ft 4in Finn's seventh season at Liverpool and a new contract extension means he will be at Anfield until 2008, the year Liverpool becomes the European city of culture. Hyypia was more comfortable discussing the future than the past, even Liverpool's recent, glorious past.

Eventually there would be concessions to Istanbul and other pivotal moments, such as Juventus away in April or the League Cup final of 2001, but Hyypia (31) said he had been hardened by his time in England - "I've seen that English people are very tough" - and his assimilation into English football culture is such that, without any self-consciousness, when referring to Gerard Houllier and Rafael Benitez, he said: "I've had two foreign managers here."

It was Houllier who bought Hyypia, for £2.6 million from Willem II in the Netherlands in July 1999. Under the Frenchman, Hyypia won the Uefa Cup, the FA Cup, two League Cups, a European Super Cup and a Charity Shield. Put like that, Houllier's record is impressive yet his dismissal last summer was no surprise.

In came Benitez and within a year Hyypia had added the Champions League to his collection. It is some haul and yet the absence of a league title nags at the Finn the way it does at Liverpool supporters. It is all part of the Liverpool puzzle, that they could win the European Cup but finish 37 points adrift of Chelsea and below Everton. The Spaniard and Liverpool, indeed, had an odd, great first season together. Discuss.

"That last season was a little bit strange," Hyypia said. "We had a new manager and new players and the manager and the players knew more about European football. The Premiership is a different thing. The new manager brought new tactics and maybe (in England) they did not work as well as they should have. The away form was where we struggled, of course. Our home form was pretty okay.

"But the way I see it is the cycle has started again with Rafael Benitez. He is a very good manager, very disciplined, very strict. He has the tactics in his mind, how we should move when the ball is on the left side or whatever - you do exactly what was planned. That is a good thing, I like discipline a lot, that's a base from which a team can play together. Tactically he is very strong."

But at the moment when he was tested most, half-time in Istanbul, what was Benitez like?

"He was very positive. Not many believed we could still win, 3-0 at half-time to AC Milan, it feels like hopeless. But he was very positive that we could work harder and if we got one goal back . . . And for the people who travelled from Liverpool to see the match, he said we had to give something back to them. Then the tactical changes: Steve Finnan had some problems so Didi Hamann came into midfield and we went three at the back. It worked perfectly. He is a very clever man, he knows which strings to pull in any given situation.

"I have trust in him. When we came back from summer holiday on the first day he took me into his office and said: 'We are looking for a centre-half.' I said: 'Fine, competition is good.'

"Come January, I bet someone comes in. But I look at it positively. I feel Rafael Benitez brings good days, a lot of trophies." Domestically, this season has brought one goal in three games, but also three clean sheets. After Tottenham last Saturday it also brought an admission from Jamie Carragher that the 15-year wait for a league title may soon be 16.

"If you are realistic, it is very difficult for us to win the title," Hyypia agreed. "Chelsea are a great team and for them to be 37 points ahead of us last season, maybe we can't get past them this season. But we are definitely going to close the gap, and fight.

"I don't think Carra meant we will give up. Maybe Carra wanted to take some pressure off the team. We haven't given up anything.

"It will take time for the manager to get the squad he wants. This season we have (Bolo) Zenden, (Peter) Crouch, (Mohammed) Sissoko and (Pepe) Reina, new faces. We will be more ready for the task.

"It's difficult to compare with the past - 2001 was a good year, we won five trophies. But if you don't have the resources then you have to improve the team play. That is one strength we had last season, especially in Europe, all the tactics of the manager worked there. One game was Juventus away; 2-1 at home was not too good because you know 1-0 is enough for them. In that away game offensively we did not do much, but we kept it compact and we worked very hard for the draw. We just had to be ruthless.

"There were other games like that where we came together - the final."

Hyypia selected beating Birmingham in the League Cup in 2001, his first trophy, as the highlight of his Anfield career to date, while finishing below Everton last season represents "the biggest disappointment so far".

It was even worse, he said, than being sent off at Old Trafford three Aprils ago four minutes into a 4-0 defeat. "Van Nistelrooy was going through and maybe I took his shirt a little bit. The referee thought so. I got a straight red card. They got a penalty. It was an agony to watch the game in the dressingroom. The only red card of my career. You remember that sort of thing."

It will have to jostle for space in Hyypia's memory bank and, as he said, he expects to bank more soon.