BEFORE yesterday’s game, Rafael Benitez declared he was hopeful of soon locking horns with Carlo Ancelotti in a third Champions League final.
But the growing fear is that the managerial foes will not be competing for honours at the top of the Premier League this season.
While the championship is not won by October, it can be lost. And the evidence suggests Liverpool will struggle to replicate their enthralling title challenge of the previous campaign.
What else to believe after a disappointing defeat at Chelsea, a third loss in their first eight Premier League games?
The last time a team won the title from that position was Manchester United in 1966-67.
Yet it isn’t just history – and the six-point gap to Ancelotti’s leaders – that is pointing to Liverpool facing an enormous task in ending a championship drought that stretches back to 1990.
Yes, Benitez’s side have acquired the knack of seeing off the lesser lights, a shortcoming that ultimately undermined their title challenge last season.
But against any opposition that could be described as being half-decent, they have come unstuck. First Tottenham Hotspur. Then Aston Villa. Now both Fiorentina and Chelsea in the space of five days.
That is simply not good enough. And with moneybags Manchester City and a revitalised Arsenal pressing their title claims, the suspicion persists that last season may prove an opportunity missed for Benitez.
Even the new expansive style has hit a brick wall. Having scored 24 goals in their first nine games, Liverpool have now fired blanks in successive games.
And they rarely appeared capable of breaking through an impressive Chelsea defence yesterday until it was much too late.
Indeed, stand-in Chelsea goalkeeper Hilario, deputising for the suspended Petr Cech, could surely have not expected such a comfortable 90 minutes.
With neither Fernando Torres nor Steven Gerrard allowed to perform anywhere near their best, Liverpool struggled to generate a threat inside the penalty area.
In fairness, the same applied to Chelsea. Yet when Ancelotti’s side did fashion rare clear openings, they were taken. And that, as so often proves the case in these tense fixtures, proved the difference. Small details, as Benitez would say.
After attracting increasing criticism, this was a much-improved display from Liverpool’s defence – Glen Johnson secure against his former club and Martin Skrtel in particular atoning for his Florence misery – but, not for the first time, Didier Drogba proved their nemesis.
The match was billed as a showdown between Drogba and Torres, and it was the Ivorian who emerged a clear winner having created both Chelsea goals for Nicolas Anelka and substitute Florent Malouda.
Such a pity, then, that the Ivorian deems it necessary to resort to his own brand of acting, the nadir of which came when he was writhing on the turf after being dumped there by legendary hard-man Yossi Benayoun.
Javier Mascherano’s welcome return from a hamstring injury added steel to a Liverpool central midfield that was so worryingly overrun at Fiorentina in midweek.
