This was Liverpool's worst performance in Europe since their previous brush with Portuguese opposition 18 months ago, yet somehow they emerged unscathed, despite losing Jermaine Pennant to a red card.
Pennant was sent off for a second bookable offence in the 58th minute, but it had long been clear that anything Liverpool got from this game would be a bonus. Tormented, almost to the point of submission, by Ricardo Quaresma in the early stages, they had fallen behind to an eighth-minute penalty from Lucho González and briefly looked in danger of collapsing until Dirk Kuyt scored an unlikely equaliser nine minutes later. How the scores remained level after that had less to do with any great resolve on Liverpool's part than with the lack of conviction shown by FC Porto, unlike the Benfica team who eliminated the Merseyside club two seasons ago.
As they emerged from the dressing-room afterwards, Jamie Carragher and Steven Gerrard wore the look of men who knew that they had been let off the hook. Carragher was doing himself an injustice, as perhaps the only Liverpool player to emerge with credit, but Gerrard and too many others were off the pace from the start. "The warm-up was OK and everything was going to be good," Benítez said, fully aware that he would not have been in such good humour had Porto not run out of steam so early in the game.
It was incongruous, almost incredible, to see a Benítez team start a game so poorly. Liverpool pride themselves on being organised, on staying compact and keeping their shape. Here they were a horrible mess for the first ten minutes, unable to get their act together before Lucho González had given Porto the lead.
That goal had the effect of a wake-up call, but Jesualdo Ferreira, the Porto coach, felt that his team should have been out of sight even before then, citing the chance missed by Lisandro López in the second minute after Steve Finnan's attempted clearance was charged down by the mercurial Quaresma.
It was only a matter of time before Porto scored, with a penalty inevitable after José Manuel Reina rushed from his goal to bring down Tarik Sektioui. The goalkeeper lashed the ball away in frustration after diving to his right and the penalty being sent down the middle, but the problem had arisen when Sami Hyypia's lack of pace was painfully exposed as Sektioui raced on to a perfectly weighted pass from Lucho González.
As the noise finally died down in the stadium, Gerrard could be heard imploring his teammates to raise their game, but Liverpool's famed powers of recovery had seemed little in evidence before they scored a goal that owed more to guts than ingenuity. A harmless-looking free kick was sent by Finnan towards the penalty area, where Hyypia's header seemed to spend an age in the air before Kuyt, attacking the ball while the defenders stood and watched, headed past Nuno. According to Uefa's statistics, it was their only goal attempt all evening.
The goal sucked the energy - or perhaps the belief - out of Porto, but Liverpool remained strangely erratic in their passing, sluggish in their movement and clumsy in the tackle, which Pennant would come to regret. Fortunate not to be booked early for a foul on Quaresma, he was shown the yellow card, a little unluckily, for a challenge on the same player in the 25th minute. Then, 13 minutes into the second half, he mistimed a challenge on Fucile as he chased the ball towards the corner flag. With the Porto defender writhing in mock agony, the subsequent flurry of cards, yellow then red, was no surprise.
Even then, though, Liverpool might even have won had Kuyt not been dispossessed with two minutes remaining after a move of rare quality between Andriy Voronin, Fabio Aurelio and Gerrard. That would have been robbery. So, too, in a sense, was the draw.
Definitely one point gained.