For 51 minutes, Liverpool ravaged a hapless Charlton yet had nothing to show for their domination. It had been like this in the first half of their Champions League match against Deportivo in midweek, when they were thwarted to the end.
This time John Arne Riise and Luis Garcia conjured two wonderful goals from the debris of their team's earlier, fumbling endeavours, and the gallery was sated. Liverpool's 100 per cent home record was intact, another quest for qualification to the continent's top table reinforced.
Charlton had been thumped for three fours away from home and can consider themselves fortunate not to have been despatched to Anfield's boundary. They were not so much outplayed as trampled under foot.
Rafael Benitez, the Liverpool manager, is demanding greater consistency from his players and looked on in growing disbelief as they created, and squandered, a spate of first-half chances. Riise was among those culpable but blame was shared by his strikers, Djibril Cisse and Milan Baros.
Liverpool's catalogue of misses began from the first minute. Garcia, lunging to meet Steve Finnan's centre, headed off target. Riise tried to manoeuvre the ball to his left foot and the opening was gone. Both were to miss out again in an extraordinary opening spell.
Soon after, Shaun Bartlett gave Chris Kirkland some routine fielding practice and then failed to capitalise on Lisbie's excellent leap and header down as Charlton sought to retaliate. It was a brief riposte.
Liverpool resumed their sweeping offences and Sami Hyypia, rising unchallenged to head Garcia's corner kick, was denied by Murphy's goal-line block. Cisse turned away in exasperation after striking a post from 25 yards.
The goal beckoned twice in five more frenetic minutes for Baros and twice the winner of the Euro 2004 Golden Boot fluffed his lines.
Cisse snatched at a shot and dragged the ball across the face of goal. Baros, from the corner of the six-yard box, thrashed an effort high and wide. Cisse, not to be outdone, went higher and wider. Garcia was next up, but Charlton's defenders ganged up on him and stifled his intentions.
Charlton came through another scare early in the second half, when Dean Kiely scrambled away Xabi Alonso's free-kick. The Spaniard was again denied by Lisbie's block, but now there was to be no reprieve. Riise, relieved to take the ball on his left, finally broke the deadlock, beating Kiely to the goalkeeper's right with a sweetly-struck shot from outside the area.
Garcia demonstrated how chances should be taken after 73 minutes, defying Kiely's leap with a 25-yard shot that arched away from the keeper. The diminutive Spaniard, his confidence soaring, attempted an audacious volley that almost produced a sumptuous third. Not that it mattered, Charlton's cause had long been hopeless.