Sour Reds turning on Gerrard

Quite. After Liverpool's 3-1 win over Bayer Leverkusen last Tuesday, let's not forget their chances of reaching the last eight of the Champions League look rosier than Chelsea's.

We also know that those Liverpool fans today slaughtering him would not have been doing so if Paulo Ferreira had not made such a timely intervention just when it seemed Gerrard must convert Antonio Nunez's cross from the right and make it 2-0. A foot further left and he would have been deified.

Yet did this turn out to be his worst day for Liverpool simply because of manager Rafael Benitez's conservatism after their 43-second opener. Gerrard's licence to maraud was immediately taken from him as he was asked to play a simple holding, linking role rather than be a driving force. Claude Makelele does a similar job incomparably well for Chelsea; Gerrard just looked wasted.

Next year, Jose Mourinho won't waste him. The last thing Gerrard probably wanted after this was to have the Portuguese offering him a pat of consolation but, as is Mourinho's wont, he did that to all his vanquishedopponents. One suspects it will become his ritual after patting the silverware.

Nobody ever said Mourinho was going to be easy to like but it's already impossible not to admire the winning mentality he has moulded in blue. You really could see a team forged in his image in Cardiff - tungsten, talented, relentless, selfconfident, utterly committed and bloody-minded.

More than that, though, it was possible to feel within this extraordinary customer the fire of indignation which seems to propel him and his side. His message, paraphrased, seems to be "no one likes us or our dosh, we don't care". His Chelsea are coming over like Millwall with millions.

The one odd thing, though, is that Mourinho's Chelsea do not appear to possess any of their master's flamboyant eccentricities and cocksure excesses which we really can now believe are going to make him a Cloughie for the third Millennium. He directs excellence yet provides the soap opera himself.

Even when the victory was won, the man who had just earned the dubious distinction of being the first manager ever to be expelled from the touchline in a century of showpiece English Cup finals, for his inflaming of Liverpool fans with a 'shut up' finger-to-lips gesture after Chelsea's equaliser, was still up for a fight. With Her Majesty's Press this time.

"A lot of you are very frustrated at the moment because you can't write what you want to write. So tomorrow is a big bad feeling for you," he said, telling the man from The Sun splendidly "you think you are a bad boy . . . but I can be a bad boy" before seemingly inviting him for further measured debate at the Cobham training ground.

"It's not about me," concluded Mourinho after his unique expulsion. "It's about us." Sometimes, you forget this, though, since the cult of his still unfathomable personality so dominates games these days.

Yet, strangely, it almost feels as if his larger-than-life presence may actually take the pressure off his players, since he appears quite content to direct all the loathing upon his own shoulders. Come to think of it, he may be exactly what Gerrard needs.