Patience would be key to beating Basel, according to Brendan Rodgers. The Liverpool manager used the word repeatedly in the pre-match press conference and here he was, 23 minutes gone, listening to the Kop demand “attack, attack, attack”. Anfield was at odds with their manager’s instruction and his team are at odds with how Rodgers once envisaged they would play on the Champions League stage. Neither his message nor Liverpool would get through despite Steven Gerrard’s attempt to turn back time and make history repeat itself.
There was a good reason Anfield was consumed by tension early in the must-win encounter against the champions of Switzerland. Basel were passing the home team to pieces. Fabian Frei opened the scoring two minutes after the plaintive cry for Liverpool to show some attacking intent but they are a team reliant on their 34-year-old captain for quality and leadership. Not for the first time this season, the collective response at Anfield was ineffective.
Gerrard’s sublime 81st-minute free-kick allowed Liverpool to envisage a repeat of Olympiakos 10 years and a day after the midfielder’s 86th-minute goal against the Greek side salvaged a group campaign and started the run on Istanbul. It allowed Rodgers to laud “the outstanding” response of a team reduced to 10 men for the final half hour but there was no dressing up Liverpool’s overall performance in Europe. Not good enough, the manager thankfully admitted, and what preceded the captain’s equaliser was confirmation of why Liverpool are now in the Europa League.
Liverpool returned to the Champions League by striking fear into opponents last season, now they spread anxiety throughout their own defence and support. They have not produced one good 90-minute display in six group games and only two of those games have been against a European heavyweight. They have scored five goals, three from open play. All the finale brought was late false hope and a further demonstration of Liverpool’s enduring reliance on their captain. Without Gerrard, as they could be next summer should his contract extension remain unsigned, there is little inspiration. With him there is a chance, as his 41st goal in 130 European performances testified, but Rodgers needs far more from the supporting cast.
The one striker in Liverpool’s match-day squad, Rickie Lambert, was withdrawn at half-time and his replacement, Lazar Markovic, enlivened Anfield with the most encouraging contribution of his Liverpool career so far. It lasted 15 minutes before he was sent off for raising an arm towards the face of Behrang Safari, who collapsed pathetically when the Serbian’s finger brushed his nose. Liverpool’s fate may have been sealed in that moment but their exit has been coming over five Champions League matches without a win.
A defining period in Liverpool’s campaign, and perhaps in the reign of Rodgers, has started ominously. Liverpool head to Manchester United on Sunday, a Capital One Cup quarter-final at Bournemouth next Wednesday and host Arsenal the following weekend with Rodgers appealing for perspective but still in search of a defined way forward for the players at his disposal. “We believe in what we are doing and in what we can deliver,” said Paulo Sousa, the Basel manager, by way of stark contrast.
The Liverpool manager has arrived at his back-to-basics approach by accident, not design, and at the expense of the playing philosophy on which he built his reputation and that helped restore Liverpool to the Champions League. For a must-win game, as with recent team selections against Stoke City, Leicester City and Sunderland, the onus was on making Liverpool difficult to beat rather than taking the game to their opponents and inflicting defeat by a thousand passes. The £94m worth of signings on the bench was another sign of Liverpool’s direction altering course since the summer.
It was the 1-0 defeat in Basel that had placed Liverpool in this predicament rather than home and away losses to a Real Madrid side who cruised through the group. Rodgers created additional pressure for himself with that second-string team selection at the Bernabéu, his subsequent claims that the incoming players merited their place on the grand European stage and his decision to return seven to the sidelines for the visit of Chelsea four days later. Part one of the selection gamble against the European champions was the response versus Chelsea. It backfired. Part two was securing a place in the knockout stage of the Champions League at the last. It fell short too.
“Five years was too long a period for a club like Liverpool to be absent from the best club competition in the game,” wrote Rodgers in his programme notes. “It’s an absence that has hurt us and we cannot allow the gap to ever be so great again.” Gerrard and most of the Liverpool team were on their knees at the final whistle, the stirring finale not enough to compensate for a first-half performance that ranked as their poorest in Europe this season. The elimination hurt just as much as their absence from the Champions League.
