Liverpool 2 Manchester United 0: Europe’s second cup proves big enough to fire Jurgen Klopp's side

The Reds found new joy in the trophy they cared for before Paisley, Fagan and Benitez's triumphs

Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp (Getty Images)

The Uefa Cup was the trophy Liverpool cared for in the days before Bob Paisley turned them into a side of European sophisticates with that penchant for bigger, far heavier silverware which Joe Fagan and Rafael Benitez perpetuated.

It’s why there seemed to be something forced in the club’s laudable efforts to amplify the significance of what the distinctive match programme cover proclaimed, in the style of a boxing bout billboard, to be “this evening’s main event”, pitting the local side “weighing in with 11 European trophies” at “their mythical home” against their “fierce rivals and fellow giants on the European stage”.

Though the artifice worked in a way that United’s ill-conceived plans to create a “wall of white” – by dishing out away shirts – did not, these clubs just had not anticipated their first European tie being played out on a Thursday night. Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool manager, said in his programme notes that “we have all had moments in our lives and careers where things are not as you would want them to be” and the irony seemed to run through those words, too.

On the evidence of the first leg, though, one of the two teams divined that a result, an occasion, a sense of football romance, the uncomplicated thrill of victory, matters infinitely more than the name printed on the tournament livery and carved into the trophy. It’s 15 years since the Uefa Cup was part of a treble which broke a 17-year wait for silverware for Liverpool and perhaps that went some way to explaining why the match carried a significance for them. Why the agonies of the nerve-shredded souls in the Main Stand were even greater than usual.

The older ones in that number knew that Bill Shankly, the creator of so much of the joy that has flowed at Anfield, would not have viewed the Europa League as an embarrassing reflection of straitened times – and nor, too, his players. John Toshack played holy hell with Shankly for not naming him in his team for the fog-abandoned Uefa Cup final first leg against Borussia Mönchengladbach in 1973. What degenerated into a slanging match between the two of them resulted in Toshack being selected for the re-arranged game and playing a big part in winning it. Toshack, with a deteriorating knee condition, knew all about the struggles for fitness we have seen in Daniel Sturridge, and the frustrations of being asked to play through them, and there was something of his spirit in what we saw from the 26-year-old as Liverpool’s night burst into life, midway through the first half.

Perhaps the sense of victimhood he feels about the way his commitment has been questioned will serve Liverpool well. He seemed to have something to prove in his 63 minutes of football. There were signs of the threat Liverpool have been waiting to rediscover in him – not least his shimmy across the right side of the penalty area to deliver a precision cross that Philippe Coutinho would have netted had he let it flow naturally on to his left foot rather than strike with his right.

That would have doubled the lead Sturridge had driven Liverpool into, with his pinpoint penalty-kick.

The intensity Klopp demands of Liverpool is sometimes best judged by his own demeanour. His public touchline evisceration of Alberto Moreno, for a moment’s indecision, seemed harsh but that was the way Manchester United found the home side to be. They were pressed to death and struggled so much as to advance out of their own territory.

Van Gaal’s team was a reflection of his grey demeanour: shapeless, lifeless, witless in defence

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It’s not a vintage Liverpool, of course. It may be 18 months before we begin to see the Liverpool Klopp imagines. But Europe – even in this shape and size – seemed to be a matter of life and death. That much was evident in Emre Can, driving through the central areas and distributing for Moreno’s driving runs, the effervescent Coutinho and the intermittent goalscoring danger of Roberto Firmino.

Though this is the competition that Sir Alex Ferguson once described as “a penalty”, United’s need to win it is arguably the greater. The near three-year wait for silverware is as nothing compared with what Liverpool have suffered, yet the oxygen that some kind of glory would send through Old Trafford’s stifled corridors is incalculable. Louis van Gaal, the manager, just could not conjure a sense of this: no sense of the old-fashioned excitement provided by his opposite number who, with an intuitive sense of occasion, had described this occasion as “the mother of all battles”.

Van Gaal’s team reflected his grey demeanour: shapeless, lifeless, occasionally witless in defence. The worry for Liverpool was that the superiority had not really paid out until Michael Carrick’s timid clearance handed Firmino the chance to double the lead, which so he gratefully accepted.

There are echoes in the 2-0 scoreline of Liverpool’s all-English European Cup tie with Nottingham Forest in 1979, when Paisley’s side conceded a second goal at the City Ground that proved so decisive. United’s supporters seemed to know it. They didn’t collect the free away shirts on offer and they did not create that wall of white the marketing people had hoped for. The whiff of euphoria and smoking red flares filled the Anfield ground when they chanted, from their away enclosure, to the tune of the song about winning the cup: “We’re going on the piss.”