While Manchester United, the eventual champions, set out as they meant to go on with a 5-1 mauling of Fulham, Liverpool stumbled to a miserable 1-1 draw away to Sheffield United as Benitez's decision to pick a weakened team backfired.
Five of the players that featured that day - Craig Bellamy, Robbie Fowler, Mark Gonzalez, Jan Kromkamp and Boudewijn Zenden - are no longer at the club, and as a further 14 dropped points in the next eight Barclays Premier League games proved, Liverpool were without any momentum in the weeks that followed that underwhelming afternoon at Bramall Lane.
Benitez neglected to include the likes of Xabi Alonso and Dirk Kuyt in his squad because of the Champions League qualifier away to Maccabi Haifa a few days later, but faced with an almost identical situation this time around, the manager has made it clear that he will not be making the same mistakes again.
Liverpool travel to Toulouse for another Champions League qualifying tie next week, but rather than pick a team against Aston Villa that tries to over-compensate for that tricky test to France, Benitez has vowed to name his strongest possible XI today as the Merseyside club aim to send out a statement of intent.
"If you start winning straight away it's clear it'll be good for confidence," he said. "The first game is important psychologically."
Not that Benitez is about to abandon his fabled rotation policy. The Spaniard may have had a full pre-season in which to prepare his players, unlike last summer when the World Cup finals appeared to hinder Liverpool more than United or Chelsea, but the man from Madrid remains convinced that the only way to prevent tiredness from permeating the ranks is to meddle with the team.
Closer inspection of the statistics actually reveals that Benitez made only as many changes - 118 - in Premier League games as Sir Alex Ferguson, the United manager, last season (Jose Mourinho made the same number in Chelsea's title-winning campaign the previous season).
The difference was that Ferguson and Mourinho would rarely make wholesale changes, as Benitez often did, and as his critics argue, that is where Liverpool have fallen down. Benitez, nonetheless, remains undeterred.
"You play too many, difficult games not to change players," he said. "It's not easy to keep the same team. I know everyone would like to see the same XI starters almost every week but it's impossible.
"If we can keep some players who are playing well in the team and we're winning we'll try to do it, but if we need to use different players then we will.
"How many teams in the Premier League can keep the same XI each week? Maybe those from about eighth down can because they only play one game a week on average, but there's a big difference between playing 60 or so games a season and 42 or something."
Having signed two wide players in Ryan Babel and Yossi Benayoun, and with Harry Kewell fully recovered from the injuries that kept him sidelined for most of last season, Benitez is likely to appease some of his critics by starting with Steven Gerrard in central midfield more often than out on the right.
Gerrard and Benitez have not always seen eye to eye, but like his captain, the manager is reluctant to make predictions for the new season, even if he appears more confident than ever of ending the club's 17-year wait for the league championship.
"I don't want to seem arrogant but when I was at Valencia, the club went 31 years without winning the Spanish title and then we won it," Benitez said. "After that we won it again. Why? Because my staff and players got better and better.
"Hopefully we can do that at Liverpool as well. I don't know if it will be this year or the next one, because I don't want to promise anything, but all I can say is that we have a better team, better squad, are working hard and I have confidence. If the new players settle down quickly and properly we will have more of a chance."