You don't get to win the Champions League, FA Cup and a brace of La Liga titles outside of Madrid and Barcelona while cloaked in football ignorance. However, you can still have bad days, and bad seasons and maybe you can even lose, if not the entire dressing room, the odd hugely expensive signing.
If Rafa Benitez had lost Robbie Keane to any greater degree on Saturday the £20m Dubliner might not have been scowling on the bench but inhabiting some unlogged South Pacific island. Suddenly Benitez's huge and apparently failed investment in a striker whose performances for Tottenham often pushed back the limits of overachievement seemed not so much misadventure as an indication of a potentially fatal weakness.
Certainly, the Liverpool manager's obscure reaction to a tough post-match grilling over his refusal to inject Keane into an increasingly futile attempt to find a winning goal in the second half – while sending on the midfielder Lucas and wingers Ryan Babel and Nabil El Zahr – could only add to the pressure facing him after a third straight failure to win at home.
Benitez said: "You have to think about winning. For me, the best thing was to use wingers and an offensive midfielder that can pass the ball better, because in the last minutes of the game you need someone calm who can pass the ball. To put more people into the box and start playing long balls is not the solution."
Perhaps not but Benitez's choice of options begged a question that is bound to gain ground as Liverpool's promise of ending their title drought slips back towards its old fantasy status.
Why spend £20m on a striker deemed not fit for purpose when the overwhelming priority is to find the net?
Was it because you thought you could build on the impressive levels of efficiency Keane had displayed in partnership with a restive Dimitar Berbatov at White Hart Lane?
That certainly is the only rational explanation, but what does it say of your judgement, and powers of nurturing, if the exercise is declared moribund inside half a season and at a time of desperate need?
Keane's poor form and yield of goals, no doubt made him less than odds-on to apply a sword stroke to a brilliantly organised Hull team but his idleness on the bench still carved a huge hole into any confidence in Benitez's long-term strategy.
For some it may also have highlighted the long-held suspicion that ultimately the man from Madrid will always put more faith in the strength of his own thinking than the potential of key players to adapt and succeed in the most difficult of circumstances.
For those arguing the point, the day Hull, extraordinary and wholly admirable Hull, came to visit surely provided a van load of supporting evidence.
Benitez was asked how he imagined his decision-making had affected an already demoralised Keane. The manager said: "All the players want to play. He will be thinking the same as [David] Ngog, another striker who played really well the other day. He scored a goal and will be thinking, 'Why not me?' But this is normal. They have to understand that we need to work within the squad." The manager was no more willing to accept the point that Ngog was a youngster who had cost the club only slightly more than a twentieth of the veteran Keane's asking price than he was the idea that Liverpool's financially embattled owners might wonder about the point of having a £20m asset wiling away his time on the bench.
Lots of expensive players sit on the bench, suggested Benitez. It's true enough, of course, but then sooner or later a lot of managers also walk the plank. The fact that Benitez retains great credit for past achievements, and is reportedly close to signing a new four-year contract, maybe does little to intensify his need for self-analysis, but then his own expression didn't do much to dispel the feeling that this was more than a bad day at the office. Indeed, that it was close to catastrophic was hardly mitigated by the fact that Hull were so splendid both in their coherence and their spirit.
They played with wit and backbone and would have carried away all three points but for two classic eruptions of scoring certainty from Steven Gerrard, which rescued a result if not a performance that was as troubling in its lack of creativity as it was in a creaking defence. Just to deepen Liverpool's embarrassment, the Hull manager, Phil Brown, did not lack photographic evidence when he claimed that both the Gerrard strikes had been accompanied by off-the-ball fouls on defender Michael Turner.
Brown accused the referee, Alan Wiley, of an ultimate offence against a football professional – ball-watching. He said the crime was at least as deplorable in a referee as it would be in a defender. Another terrible defensive fault is a lack of speed, one Liverpool's left-back Andrea Dossena displayed throughout a draining examination by Bernard Mendy.
Benitez pointed out that his £7m signing from Udinese had looked good going forward, a point which might have carried more weight if Mendy had not appeared, conservatively speaking, at least three times better going in any direction – and also standing still.
It was Mendy's complete ownership of the left flank of Liverpool's defence that gave his team immediate momentum, which brought a fine headed goal from Paul McShane and forced an untypically rattled Jamie Carragher to nudge the ball into his own net. Mendy's bite and authority were both unflagging and compelling. Indeed, an impeccably legal tackle that levelled Albert Riera also brought a skip of exhilaration from Brown in the technical area.
This was probably the most revealing moment of all. It showed a coach exulting in the commitment and the confidence of one of his team. In similar circumstances the suspicion would have to be that Rafa would make a note. Unfortunately for Liverpool, what it would say at the moment is anybody's guess.
