It felt like an election campaign, everything was going reasonably smoothly, everyone was warming up to your approach, some punters were, in a way, preparing to wax lyrically on your chances, but then one moment of madness on election-day eve and it is all lost. Added to that, you have to endure the opposition's goading in your own pad.

Yesterday felt bad. Awful, horrible, profligately wrong and unstomachable. Losing at home was bad enough, but to Manchester United . . . totally unpalatable. Liverpool started well enough, had their own chances in the first half, mostly thanks to Jon Arne Riise's left foot and Craig Bellamy's supremacy over Nemanja Vidic. Then they started the second half with all guns blazing, came off their blocks really quickly, had their precious chances but they still didn't get anything to show for it.

For most of the second half  they still were on top, but with a slower tempo. The dying minutes saw the very best chance of the game go to the fresh Peter Crouch, who had just entered the fray as a substitute. He was allowed to chest the ball down at the far post and get a volley on target from only four or five yards. But United goalkeeper Edwin Van Der Sar was perfectly positioned to brilliantly turn the ball aside for Vidic to boot clear.

It seemed as though a scoreless draw was inevitable, and it had to be accepted. Even in the dying minutes Liverpool were given the kind of boost from which they should have made profit. United's Paul Scholes was shown a red card after flapping his hand at Javi Alonso in retaliation and the visitors were down to 10 men.

But fate took a hand. Liverpool conceded a free-kick on the edge of the penalty area, Cristiano Ronaldo fired in the ball hard and low, and as goalkeeper Pepe Reina spilled the ball, United substitute John O"Shea hammered it into the roof of the net.

In a match that Liverpool dominated, centre-back Jamie Carragher looked head and shoulders above his team-mates. For the umpteenth time he showed total bulldog spirit commitment to the cause. His two perfect tackles in space of seconds in the first half, first to deny Ronaldo and then Wayne Rooney, were marvellous and a joy to behold. A leader on and off the pitch.