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Liverpool back to dine at Europe's top table

Anfield has waited a long time to once again host Champions League football and fans hope it's back for the long haul, writes Richard Buxton.

It was Roy Evans, the former Liverpool manager, who once declared: “European football without Liverpool is like a banquet without wine.”

After five years away from the Champions League, they could be forgiven for devouring the aperitifs when Anfield returns to the competition tonight.

Their status as five-time winners, with a half-century of history to boot — this week marks the 50th anniversary of their first foray — vindicates Ian Ayre’s assertion last month that the tournament which will welcome them back this evening is very much where they belong.

It may have been a little self-indulgent from the Anfield chief. Chelsea remain the country’s most recent winners, Nottingham Forest usurped the Reds as champions of Europe in 1979 before retaining the title a year later and Manchester United boast three titles, not least the legacy of Wembley 1968, a decade after the Busby Babes were obliterated in Munich.

Yet Liverpool’s connection with the European Cup seems to carry a greater bond than their contemporaries’.

They are level-pegged with Bayern Munich on titles while only holders and future Group B opponents Real Madrid, winners a record 10 times, and AC Milan, with seven, can lay stronger claims.

That half-decade in the wilderness has done little to dampen an insatiable appetite for the operatic tones of the competition’s anthem to again boom out across Anfield, its iconic “star ball” logo to grace the centre circle and the game’s great and good to bask in its floodlights.

Revelling in the nostalgia of Inter Milan in 1965, Saint-Etienne in 1977 and Chelsea in 2005 — three legendary encounters that regaled misty-eyed Liverpool supporters across the ages — and yearning for such nights is no longer a flight of fancy. They have returned with a vengeance.

These are the occasions on which the Kop thrives, but their route back into the Champions League has come at a hefty premium.

Once the envy of their Premier League peers due to an exemplary Uefa coefficient ranking, they can no longer make such boasts.

It has plummeted to almost half of what it was when they last appeared in — and crashed out of — the competition in 2009. They now have to rebuild their continental stock.

Even Rafael Benitez — the man who led them to that legendary triumph in Istanbul in 2005, and whose quote: “To me, being a part of Europe’s elite is central to this club’s ethos,” has been immortalised on a plinth in the foyer of the club’s Melwood training ground — had lost sight of that principle by the end of his tenure.

From that whimperish group stage exit five years ago, only four players remain in the first-team squad.

Only Steven Gerrard, who lifted the trophy on that famous night in the Ataturk Stadium, is likely to feature when Ludogorets travel to Anfield tonight.

Between a dramatic courtroom battle for ownership, a turnover of four managers in two years and a combined transfer outlay of £229.8 million, Liverpool’s road back to the Champions League has been a far from smooth passage.

Bill Shankly, who first led the club into Europe, famously said: “Liverpool Football Club exists to win trophies” but that has appeared increasingly less the case in recent times.

Lifting the League Cup and reaching the FA Cup final could not spare Kenny Dalglish from the axe by the club’s US owners in 2012 following a 17-point qualification shortfall.

Their unprecedented leap from seventh-place to Premier League runners-up in the space of 12 months has vindicated the faith and patience shown in his successor Brendan Rodgers, not least after the 41-year-old secured their long-awaited return to the Champions League.

Three managers before him tried and failed to reach the footballing promised land.

The greatest challenge for Rodgers now is not providing a repeat of last season’s remarkable title challenge, but ensuring that Liverpool are never again found begging for scraps from the continental top table.

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