• Champions League

Liverpool's night of glory amid the chaos

Steven Gerrard is one of two survivors of the side that beat Real Madrid 4-0 in 2009, alongside Martin Skrtel © AP

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Rafael Benitez got the first message as he was having his lunch. It was February 2009, and the Liverpool manager was sitting in the team hotel in Madrid, wearing his Liverpool club tracksuit, surrounded by his Liverpool players and coaching staff.

He checked his phone, the one Liverpool had furnished and paid for. The text was from a friend.

"Apparently, you're not Liverpool manager anymore," it read.

That would be the first of dozens of messages Benitez got that afternoon. They would come from well-wishers and journalists and associates. The details in each would vary, but the theme would be the same.

The questions would ask if his contract talks had collapsed, if he had walked off the team bus, if he had decided to leave at the end of the season. They would all ask if he had heard the rumours and if they were true.

Rafael Benitez led Liverpool to two Champions League finals and four top-four finishes in the Premier League © AP

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In truth, no, he had not. All Benitez knew as he sat in his club tracksuit was that - as he wrote in his autobiography, Champions League Dreams - "If I had been relieved of my duties, nobody had bothered to tell me."

As far as he was concerned, he was still Liverpool manager, and he had a game to prepare for: a visit to the Bernabeu to play Real Madrid in the Champions League.

Time did not serve to illuminate him. When we collaborated on that book three years ago, he still had no idea how the rumours had started or why they had spread so quickly, so fervently.

It is Real's visit to Anfield on Wednesday that has brought those memories back, of course, but this is a rematch in name only. The Real Madrid that will play on Merseyside this week is a very different club than the one Liverpool met in 2009.

Real's reaction to the humiliation of a 5-0 aggregate defeat a few months later was to sign Cristiano Ronaldo, Kaka and Karim Benzema as Florentino Perez returned to the president's office and heralded a second age of the Galacticos.

Jose Mourinho would follow a year later as manager, the Spanish title the season after that and then, after 12 agonising years, la decima, the 10th European Cup that Real had yearned for and Perez had spent so much hoping to acquire.

They will return to Anfield as the European champions, as the most glamorous club in the world, as a bona fide superpower, and seemingly destined to occupy that title for eternity.

Liverpool's journey has been very different. They lost their Champions League status before Christmas 2009 and did not regain it until this summer.

Europe is as integral to Liverpool's identity as it is to Real Madrid's; with a combined 15 wins, these two sides, along with AC Milan, are defined by the European Cup more than anything else. Ian Ayre, Liverpool's managing director, described it a little ambitiously as "our competition" when the draw was made in August. Those five years in the wilderness hurt.

Football being as it is, the temptation is to marvel at how much work Liverpool have to do before they are capable, once more, of considering themselves Real's peers. It is tempting to assert that perhaps Brendan Rodgers, the man who has restored them to the elite, is under pressure because he has not yet been able to build on the rich promise of the past season and to suggest the club's failure to get beyond the group stage - a very real possibility - would be simply unacceptable.

The problem is, to do so would ignore the realities of where Liverpool have been in the past five years - some very dark places, indeed.

Benitez's successes in Europe - not so much the remarkable 2005 victory over AC Milan, but those grand old nights at Anfield in the following four years - disguised how much of a mess the club was. To some extent, so did his domestic performances.

He is often berated for his perceived failure in the Premier League, which seems harsh given that he managed four top-four finishes out of six and only missed out in his first and last years (though you'd probably take the Champions League victory as consolation for the former), something a lot of other managers seem to have an awful lot of difficulty doing.

Tom Hicks and George Gillett destabilised Liverpool to its core, a period in their history that the club is still recovering from © AP

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Benitez - and his players, of course - performed a trick of the light. They made Liverpool look like they were underperforming, when the reality was very different. No matter how much they spent, Liverpool were far exceeding realistic expectations, given the state of the club under the ownership of Tom Hicks and George Gillett from early 2007 to late 2010.

That day in Madrid was a microcosm of that time. Indeed, it serves as a pretty powerful metaphor for Hicks and Gillett's Liverpool overall, the Liverpool with which Benitez spent so much of his time. The background of uncertainty made it seem a club on the brink, against which - contrary to all logic - came a dash of glory.

Liverpool won in the Bernabeu that February 2009 night. The rumours about his future had been so potent that one or two players even sought out Benitez as he relaxed in his room, polishing the final details of his game plan, preparing what he was going to say.

And yet, after all that doubt, they went out and beat Real Madrid, a victory that sparked a quite remarkable month and possibly Benitez's best few weeks in England: the 4-0 win in the return that reduced Iker Casillas to tears, the 4-1 crushing of Manchester United at Old Trafford, a 5-0 demolition of Aston Villa.

All through that time, chaos was eating away at the very fabric of the club, a chaos created by Hicks and Gillett as they tried everything to retain control. It has been forgotten, in the Premier League's amnesiac soap opera, just how serious the problems Liverpool faced were.

By the time they were forced to sell to the Boston-based Fenway Sports Group (FSG) in October 2010 - by which time Benitez had departed - the damage was done: Liverpool were $453 million in debt.

Now Liverpool are back in the Champions League. They are, in that sense, a Champions League club.

But they are not yet a Champions League Club, one of those teams - such as Real or Chelsea or Barcelona or Bayern Munich - that is there every year, that is set up to cope with its unique demands, that can be expected to thrive and that can sign the very best players in the world because it is guaranteed to be in the competition all players desire. The recovery process is not yet complete.

That is not because of Rodgers or Kenny Dalglish or Roy Hodgson or even Benitez. It is not because they should have bought this player when they bought that player or because they spent this amount of money and not that amount of money.

It is always reassuring to blame managers and players for failure. That is the comforting language of football, the familiar, the convenient. But what Liverpool went through, what they are still trying to overcome, ran deeper.

Real return to Anfield to find a club still recovering from the era of Hicks and Gillett. The wounds have healed, but Liverpool are not yet what they were - competing to win the Champions League with Europe's best. It will take some time yet. That is worth remembering when noting how far they have fallen.

Liverpool's success is defined by their five triumphs in the European Cup and Champions League © AP

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This article first appeared on ESPN FC

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