Willpower? Decades of enmity? A Freudian appreciation of the unconscious power of dreams? None of them. Liverpool won simply because Manchester United "have weaknesses" in defence which go undetected because teams do not take enough possession of the ball to test their back four, he said. "They have quality, a lot of quality in attack. That is the main thing that they have," Benitez declared. "They're strong in defence because they have plenty of possession. But when they don't have the ball and you move the ball quickly and play behind the defenders, you know you can beat them." Benitez would not "talk about players" where United were concerned, though he said Liverpool had identified that Fernando Torres could beat Nemanja Vidic, whose afternoon was excruciating. "That was one of the ideas. We knew that maybe with [Torres'] movement we could create problems for the defenders."
It was an extraordinary assertion, which spared Ferguson questions about why he persists in playing Anderson against Steven Gerrard based on one good display 15 months ago, and statistically, there is a case to be made. Chelsea did not force a single tackle from Vidic in their feckless 3-0 defeat at Old Trafford in January while Jonny Evans, deputising for Rio Ferdinand, made four, three of them unsuccessful.
In Benitez's vast library of DVDs at Melwood will be last March's visit to Old Trafford, including the appalling hash Rio Ferdinand made of a Steven Gerrard free-kick which so surprised Torres that he stabbed wide the ball which reached him, with the goal at his mercy. United, 1-0 up at the time, extended their lead minutes later. No defence is inviolable; no side untouchable. Just ask Fabio Cannavaro and Vidic, tortured and embarrassed by the same 24-year-old Spaniard in the space of 100 hours.
For those inclined to believe that the challenging list of sides United must face before the season runs its course - Aston Villa, Everton, Manchester City and Arsenal among them - should take heed, stop going into games like quivering wrecks and build some welcome suspense into this interminable season, the sobering facts are that none of them has a Gerrard and Torres combination and that even Liverpool, a pearl-and-swine side with a threadbare squad, will not always be able to call on the two as they journey on in Europe. Javier Mascherano provided the necessary reality check on a league table which United will lead by seven points if they win their game in hand, against Wigan. "It would be wrong of us to start talking about being in the title race again," he said. "United still have a good lead over us. If [they] don't lose then it will be really difficult to catch them. The problem is we have dropped a lot of very important points at home."
But history may assign a significance far greater than the settings of a solitary season to Saturday 14 March 2009. It was the day when Benitez, the "fat Spanish waiter" as Mancunians like to call him, ensured that Ferguson will be checking in his soup as well as under his pasta until the day he packs in. Eight goals in four days against two of Europe's mightiest names affirm his future at Anfield and create the negotiating power to build the kind of power base Benitez wants there. Future resources are an uncertainty. "I think today in modern football the money makes a massive difference, you could see that in their substitutes. Tell me the value of these players," said Benitez, whose turnover of players is the most serious question mark against him. But Liverpool are improving and the way Benitez dismantled the hegemony of Real Madrid and Barcelona while at Valencia provides a symmetry as dreadful to Ferguson as his two league defeats against Liverpool this season. "Hopefully, he [Ferguson] will see Liverpool as a new contender. It will be good," Benitez said.
The contrasting football philosophies - Ferguson's fire and Benitez's DVD collection; United's lustrous attacking principles and Benitez's notions that precisely that style can create space to exploit - add more colour to the tableau, even though Benitez insisted that the clubs' philosophies were the same.
"The mentality of our club is to win, to win everything and I think United have the same mentality," he added. United certainly looked the more spiritually impoverished on Saturday, Ferguson claiming the win was fortuitous, with Rio Ferdinand suggesting that Vidic's dismissal was dubious - "I could have got over there to cover" - and that United began to "turn the screw in the second half" when 2-1 down. Neither point held water.
United's fearlessness has led Wayne Rooney to admit that a clean sweep of five trophies is now a subject of dressing-room conversation but that challenge seems an albatross and Carrington will be a quiet place this Friday if Liverpool and United are drawn together from the Champions League quarter-final hat in Nyon. "We have confidence in Europe always," Benitez said, offering more evidence of the power of the calm and conscious mind.