However, by the time they returned to Merseyside in the very small hours of this morning, the Liverpool manager would have been tired but content.
His defence had kept its first clean sheet since April. Jose Reina had done nothing ridiculous. Dirk Kuyt and Daniel Agger had made encouraging starts in the Champions League. There had been few of the errors that had scarred the Merseyside derby and, more importantly, the gamble of resting Steven Gerrard had not exploded in his face. Against Everton, Gerrard had twice struck a post and with a minute remaining last night he seized on a loose ball, turned and shot. Again, as at Goodison Park, he looked up to see the ball strike the inside of a post and bounce to safety.
It was a winner that Liverpool, who have not now scored in the competition proper for five matches, did not quite deserve, although it cancelled out Arouna Kone's running drive that had clattered against the bar in the opening exchanges.
With Bordeaux and Galatasaray snoozing their way to a goalless draw that contained fewer chances than this one, Group C is comatose, but Benitez may well have taken the point from the beginning. PSV Eindhoven are in transition but at home they are a dangerous side who have conceded just once in their last six group matches at the Philips Stadium. Last night they tested Liverpool with shots from Edison Mendez and Jefferson Farfan that were marginally off target, and enjoyed an overwhelming amount of possession (61 per cent).
Ever since he sent a free-kick over the England wall to deny them a place in the 1994 World Cup, with Barry Davies shrieking: "He's going to flip it, he's going to flip it," Ronald Koeman has caused English teams problems. As coach of Benfica he had knocked out Manchester United and Liverpool from last season's Champions League, but he confessed that Gerrard's strike meant he was happy with a point. However, he said it in the kind of tight-lipped manner that suggested otherwise.
"It was difficult to create anything because Liverpool defended with eight players behind the ball," Koeman remarked. "I know Benitez changes his side quite a bit but I did not think Sami Hyypia and Gerrard would be omitted. The way the Liverpool midfield dropped back made it difficult for us to find a free player, but we performed intelligently and did not concede a goal." Koeman added that PSV would probably need to win away at Bordeaux or Galatasaray; he did not mention Anfield.
This encounter stood comparison with the match at Real Betis with which Liverpool opened last year's competition. Then, as now, they were involved in an awkward group and, had they lost, mounting a recovery might have proved problematic. Benitez had omitted Gerrard from that game, too, and last night he argued that with Eindhoven sandwiched between the Merseyside derby and Sunday's journey to Stamford Bridge, he could not afford to drain his captain.
"You saw Momo Sissoko, he has greater stamina than Gerrard or Alonso but he was exhausted tonight," Benitez said. The dropping of Xabi Alonso, who has been desperately out of form, and Hyypia, whose lack of pace had been ruthlessly exposed by Everton's Andrew Johnson, required no explanation.
By the time the scoreboard revealed that after 10 minutes Liverpool's statistics registered nil in all areas bar fouls and Eindhoven had struck the bar, it appeared that Benitez's team selection might be embarrassingly rebuffed. They recovered mainly because in Bolo Zenden, making his first appearance against the club where he began his professional career, and Sissoko, Liverpool had steel in midfield.
The combination of Kuyt and Craig Bellamy carried considerably more threat than the sometimes ponderous pairing of Robbie Fowler and Peter Crouch had at Goodison. Bellamy began the match in familiar fashion, losing his temper with the officials, but by the time referee Massimo Busacca spotted he had handled the ball before driving it on to Gomes' post, the Welshman acknowledged the decision with a grin and a nod of the head.
If it was a sign he now understood that these kind of European nights require a little more maturity, or simply because he knew he was guilty, it was good to see.