Columnist Giles Smith forgives himself for forgetting his team's durability and casts a supporter's eye over the first leg happenings.


Hands up if you'd sort of settled for 1-0. I've got to confess that, as we passed into time added on, I was doing my best to bring myself round to the idea.

'Two goals and a clean sheet back at our place? Tough, but by no means an impossible task,' I was telling myself. 'Could have been a lot worse, too, if Petr Cech hadn't turned that Gerrard shot over and then got in the way of that Torres one right near the end. So, 1-0 at Anfield, then. Not such a bad night's work, all things considered, in a two leg tie.'

So, it's a good job, all in all, that it was Salamon Kalou who took the ball down towards the corner flag in the third minute of injury time, rather than me. That's not because my ability, under pressure, to make a telling delivery from out wide isn't devastating in its own way. Rather, it's because Kalou was clearly one among our number who hadn't settled for 1-0.

Going home without an away goal was still, even at that point, not part of his agenda for the evening. Instead he still had the belief and the dogged, never-say-die spirit to look up, whip the ball in and beautifully find John Arne Riise, ghosting in from deep to the near post.

Talk about timing your run to perfection. Look again at the agility with which the Liverpool man gets himself down low. Look at the power he manages to impart behind the header. Look at the inch-perfect placement, wide of Reina and into the roof of the net. Riise probably won't score a better goal in his career. He certainly won't score a more valuable one from our point of view. In front of the Kop, too. Ah, the memories.

Now, obviously there are going to be some people who maintain that Carragher ought to have picked him up. And it does appear that Reina was left fearfully exposed by his central defence at that moment. I'd prefer, though, to give the credit to Riise for eluding his man.

Sometimes a player can come into the box so quickly and from such an acute angle, that not even the best defender in the world would be able to do anything about it. This was one of those occasions.

So, 1-0 was OK, but 1-1 is better. And it means we can be slightly less pedantic and irritated about the freakish nature of Liverpool's first-half goal. The quickly-taken free kick which wasn't a free kick; the sliced shot which balloon'd the ball into the box; Babel retreating from an offside position to impede Makelele and prevent him from getting to Kuyt - all of these little details we might have had to get much more worked up about, if Riise hadn't done us that last-gasp favour.

The semi-final is by no means done and dusted, of course. We'd be foolish to assume that. Liverpool will scrap for the second leg like a team that has nothing else left to play for because? well, because they are a team that has nothing else left to play for. But it gives us some real hope, I think, for a place in the final.

Of course, Liverpool being Liverpool, and Benitez being Benitez, no one of any significance from the side that turned out last night will be required to exert himself between now and the second leg.

They've got Birmingham at the weekend, which almost certainly means they'll be sending out Peter Crouch to deal with it, while the first teamers lie around at home having their calf muscles rubbed and their toenails painted.

Torres hadn't played for nine days before last night. Nine days! There must come a point, surely, where 'rested' stops being 'rested' and starts being 'not quite match fit'. But, hey - that's Benitez' problem, I guess, and no business of ours.

We, on the other hand, have the small matter of a potentially title-deciding clash with a decidedly wobbly-looking Manchester United to fit into our busy schedule in the meantime. Which is, of course, tough on us.

But we wouldn't have it any other way, would we? Certain other clubs may decide that the Champions League is the only competition worth bothering about, and set all their eggs in its one, expensively-lined basket. But here at Chelsea, we like to treat every competition with the respect that it deserves, remaining competitive across the board for as long as we possibly can. Doesn't mean you necessarily win them all, of course. But it's more satisfying, knowing that you genuinely tried.