The Liverpool captain sat out the closing stages of this routine third qualifying round, first-leg win with a foot injury after being stamped on and will find out today whether he is in danger of missing the Barclays Premier League showdown with Chelsea at Anfield on Sunday.
Gerrard was in discomfort after his foot was injured in a challenge with Achille Emana on the hour and left the field shortly afterwards. Rafael Benítez, the Liverpool manager, attempted to play down the scare after the match, but a club statement revealed that the problem would require further investigation by medical staff today, with officials indicating that, mercifully, the problem appears to be with Gerrard's toe rather than a metatarsal.
The alarm took some of the shine off Liverpool's victory, which was secured by Andriy Voronin's spectacular first-half goal, but BenÍtez is not the type to allow injuries to cloud his mood. He was more interested in accentuating the positives, not least securing one foot in the group stage of the Champions League — and with it the likelihood of at least £10 million in revenue — and a first competitive goal for the club for Voronin.
The Anfield takeover saga had still to be concluded when Liverpool announced a precontract agreement with Voronin in February and, when a couple of American tycoons rolled up the next week promising to spend money on players at the top end of the market, it was tempting to question the free-transfer signing of a much-travelled Ukrainian with a patchy scoring record in the Bundesliga.
It would be unwise to judge Voronin on a single goal, however spectacular, but yesterday and in preseason matches he has shown that he has more to his game than Sean Dundee and Erik Meijer, the previous two strikers who were brought to Anfield from the Bundesliga.
Jamie Carragher said after yesterday's match that Voronin "has been as good as anyone" since the squad returned to preseason training, but while that may have surprised some observers inside Anfield as well as outside, BenÍtez never doubted the quality of the player he signed from Bayer Leverkusen.
"It was a fantastic goal," the manager said of the 43rd-minute strike that defeated Toulouse. "There you see the quality he has. Maybe some people didn't notice when we signed him. Maybe, because there was no fee, some people prefer to talk about [Fernando] Torres [who cost £20.2 million] or other players, but we knew that he was a really good player with quality, good movement and game intelligence. We knew that he could be a revelation for us."
The qualities that Benítez mentioned hint at his preference for efficiency over flair, but this time it was Voronin's improvisation that caught the eye. There seemed no danger when Peter Crouch flicked on a lofted pass from Steve Finnan, but Voronin, taking the ball on his chest 30 yards from goal, turned sharply and unleashed a fierce right-foot shot that flew beyond the reach of Nicolas Douchez and into the top corner of the goal.
Liverpool, finding life tough in the 30C heat, rarely threatened to add to that goal. There were a couple of speculative efforts from Gerrard and a brief opening for Crouch after a flick-on by Voronin sent him behind the Toulouse defence, but nothing else of note.
The inability to kill off opponents when in control of a match has frequently been Liverpool's undoing in recent years — as it nearly was again at Villa Park on Saturday — but, after two unremarkable performances, BenÍtez will be content with back-to-back wins away from home from a team with a tendency to start the season sluggishly.
"We are happy," Benítez said. "The conditions were not the best and we were trying to protect some players, so to control the game and to win is good for us. We know that it is only half-time in the tie, but we have confidence about the second leg."
So he should. Toulouse are a decent team, who beat Lyons, the French champions, at the weekend, but they sorely lack a sense of adventure. Johan Elmander, their talented forward, was isolated for much of the match, but the most potent illustration of their conservatism came in stoppage time, when, having forced a corner, they kept four players back to mark Torres.
That is an indication that Liverpool are unlikely to be overwhelmed in the second leg, at Anfield on August 28, but before that comes the small matter of Chelsea on Sunday. With their campaign up and running on the domestic and European fronts, Benítez's team will approach that game with their confidence high. However, that will not stop them sweating on the doctor's verdict on Gerrard today.