The beautiful and the damned

Liam Mackey

Indeed, you could argue that Gerrard's comeback was even more unlikely than his team's second-half and extra-time performance against AC Milan. After all, in Istanbul Liverpool had merely to come back from the dead. Gerrard had further to travel he had to come back from the damned.

The sight of Liverpool fans burning the player's shirt gave rise to the excellent conspiracy theory that the whole saga was designed by the Liverpool marketing department to sell more replica kits. But, for a red-blooded Scouser who had spent his entire career at Anfield, the notion of going from hero to villain in the space of six weeks was clearly too painful to contemplate.

Hence, the night of the long telephone calls and then Rick Parry's early morning announcement of the most unexpected u-turn in English football history. Later, an exhausted looking Gerrard emerged to say that mistakes had been made on both sides, that he was happy it had all been resolved and that he wouldn't wish what he'd gone through over the past few weeks on any other footballer.

All of which sounded a bit melodramatic at the time and, now, even more so in the light of the terrible events which occurred in London the following morning. This was also the week when the BBC screened a powerful and disturbing documentary about the legacy of hatred bequeathed by the bloody break-up of Yugoslavia, as expressed through the bitter hostility surrounding the Serbia v Bosnia World Cup qualifier in Sarajevo earlier this year.

Here was flag-burning, hate-fuelled chanting and barely suppressed violence of the most sinister kind sport as a substitute for war, if ever it was. In the Premiership "war zone", militants burning a "traitor's" shirt is pretty unappealing at any time, but when real horror intrudes on football's mundane little enmities as it did this week these kinds of demonstrations of excessive fandom look even more pathetic than usual.

Still, you could understand how Steven Gerrard found his whole transfer situation emotionally draining, if for no other reason than that he seems to be an unusually emotional young man.

The extent to which he was unsettled at Anfield was evident over the course of a season in which, despite what the inveterate hype of the English media might suggest, he was woefully inconsistent.

It was as if some basic mood swings were reflected in his play exultant and irrepressible on the big nights in Europe, indifferent to the point of sulkiness when Liverpool were scrapping, often unsuccessfully, for points in the league.

Now that he has committed himself for four years to the club, there is an opportunity for the player to put all other distractions out of his mind, and contribute in the fullest way possible to meeting the challenges ahead.

Which, in footballing terms, are huge.

It may seem like a strange thing to say about the champions of Europe, but it is only now that Rafa Benitez can begin to show that he has truly got what it takes to rescue the club from the doldrums of the Houllier era.

Istanbul will perhaps stand forever as the greatest night in the club's history, but that's what it was a one-night stand, and not necessarily the basis for an enduring and productive relationship. Yes, it was electrifying, glorious, and ultimately well-earned but it was also freakish, surreal and something of a travesty of natural justice.

Victory all but erased some harsher truths which the game revealed about Liverpool and their manager like the fact that his ill-advised gamble on Harry Kewell completely backfired and, only by a quirk of fate, succeeded in working in his favour. Or the reality that Milan destroyed them

in the first-half and, but for Dudek's astonishing double-save, really should have won the game for a second time before the penalty shoot-out.

For sure, there were many great moments for Liverpool en route to Istanbul, most notably in the victories over Juventus and Chelsea. And in the final itself, their refusal to concede what appeared to be inevitable defeat at half-time, gave the whole world of football what is destined to be one of its most enduring legends.

And yet, and yet...all but the most red-blooded would have to accept that Liverpool's victory was the product of grand larceny rather than grand design.

If Milan hadn't grown complacent or Dudek hadn't somehow defied the laws of physics to keep out Shevchnko, Liverpool would have ended the season with less to show for themselves than in Houllier's last campaign, with Gerrard almost certainly out the door, the Champions' League beyond reach for another year, and with Benitez under fierce pressure to eliminate the poor performances which had disfigured their league campaign.

So this is the season which will answer many questions about Benitez, about Gerrard and about Liverpool's capacity to challenge the new order in English football. Many months ago, I suggested here that they could be prove to be to the Champions' League what Greece were to the European Championships.

Now that they have done just that, they have to prove that they're not like Greece at all.