Football is a funny old game. The question of what makes a great team is an interesting one - and one with an even more interesting answer. Let's start with the obvious things . . .

You want your centre-backs to be big and strong in the air, your full-backs to have pace and the energy to get up and down the touchline for 90 minutes.  You want a midfield that pass the ball around with style and precision, one that has the ability to score goals as well as set them up. You want your strikers to have sublime footwork - and heading ability - with pace, power and a real eye for goal. You want bags of creativity running through the whole team and a work ethic that is second to none.

Well, Arsenal have all of that in abundance. So why, when it comes to the biggest club competition of them all - the Champions League - do the Gunners always seem to fall at the final hurdle? What is the final missing piece of the jigsaw that would see them up there with the true greats of the game? Or, to put it another way, what do Liverpool have that they don't?

'Benitez is luckier than an Irishman with a rabbit's foot on his keyring and a four-leaf clover in his jacket pocket'


The answer is simple: A lucky manager.

There's no denying the facts. Liverpool have made two Champions League finals in three years - one of which they won - and, after Wednesday night's draw at the Emirates, are now odds-on to progress to the semi-finals yet again this season.

It is a remarkable achievement for any team, but this Liverpool outfit is one which has been pilloried all season long for their inability to mount a serious challenge for the Premier League title and their capitulation in domestic cup competitions. And yet, when it comes to Europe, the Kop boss has an Indian sign over his opponents. He just seems to get all the big decisions going his way.

He was at it again on Wednesday. While clinging on desperately to a 1-1 draw with Arsenal, Dirk Kuyt quite clearly wrapped his arm around Aleksandr Hleb and hauled him to the ground in plain view of the referee, who could only have been five yards away. But, instead of pointing to the spot, as he would have done 99 times out of 100, the ref pointed only to the corner flag.

I swear I spotted Benitez on the touchline mouthing a silent incantation to some unseen deity at that precise moment.

There was more to come. Cesc Fabregas stretched out a leg to shoot at an open goal and, as he turned to celebrate a well-deserved winner, team-mate Nicklas Bendtner briefly lost control of his own legs and - guided by invisible forces - inexplicably booted the ball off the goal-line.

In a game of such fine margins, when glory is tantalisingly close, when millions of pounds can literally be won or lost on the kick of a single ball, these are the only moments that matter. These are the moments that make history.

Let's not forget that, long before this game, Liverpool were dead and buried in the Champions League group stages this season. Defeat to Besiktas left the Reds with one point from their first three games - a position from which no other team has ever before qualified for the knockout stages. But then, no other team has Benitez in charge.

Rewind to 2005, the year Liverpool last won the famous trophy. Another all-English affair saw Rafa's boys take on Chelsea in the semi-finals and everyone expected Jose Mourinho's rampant Blues to brush aside their opponents as they had brushed aside everyone in the Premier League that year.

But again it was the curse of Benitez that proved to be the difference as the only big decision of the two legs once again went Liverpool's way. When Luis Garcia poked the ball goalward and William Gallas cleared off the line, a glazed expression seemed to come over the linesman and he raised his flag to indicate a goal.

TV replays proved inconclusive - and even Benitez refused to say whether the ball had crossed the line or not. But the decision went his way and the rest, as they say, is history.

Face it, Benitez is luckier than an Irishman with a rabbit's foot on his keyring and a four-leaf clover in his jacket pocket, sporting a pair of his favourite lucky pants under his tailored Spanish suit.

The critics have hounded him over the quality of his signings, his rotation policy, his choice of formation, even his choice of substitutes. And yet somehow he manages to drag his team of supposed second-rate no-hopers to one European final after another.

Of course, this year's quarter-final is far from finished, but Arsene Wenger must have been tearing his hair out at his sheer bad luck on Wednesday night. How he must wish he had what Benitez has.

Football is indeed a funny old game.