Liverpool finally champs again but their 30-year wait has been painfully long

Graeme Souness has always remembered the day, in the mid-1990s, when Wimbledon came to Anfield and Vinnie Jones stuck a piece of paper with the word 'BOTHERED!' over the famous 'This is Anfield' sign – Bill Shankly's creation - which the players ran under, on the way out to the pitch.

In the days when Liverpool won titles as a matter of routine, their players would have sought retribution for such an act of defilement as that.

'We were too soft,' Souness reflected in an interview for the book Men in White Suits, by Simon Hughes, which captures better than any the vital beginnings of the fall which took 30 years to fix. 'In the eighties, we could beat a team by playing football. If the other team wanted a fight, we could beat them by fighting.'

Jamie Carragher recalls in the same book watching Julian Dicks, a Souness signing, attempting long-distance running around the perimeter of Liverpool's Melwood training ground a few years later and getting lapped. 'He'd be cutting the biggest corner you've ever seen to try to catch up. Nobody would say anything,' Carragher reflected.

Though Souness has borne the brunt of criticism for the way the club fell away in the early 1990s, the point about the great sides under Shankly, Bob Paisley and Kenny Dalglish is that they would self-police. Cutting corners was never tolerated. Souness actually thumped Alan Kennedy for a succession of long balls in one '80s training session when Liverpool always played short.

Ian Rush feels that the arrival of Manchester United, Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City explain why the 1989-90 title he played a key part in was the last for three decades – but he, too, saw a dropping off of old intensities.

'What you need – and what we'd always had – was mental toughness,' he says. 'You've got to play well in five out of six games, not three out of six. After 1990 we were not hitting certain notes in games. Not making the five out of six. So maybe the signs were there.'

The cream suits Liverpool paraded on the Wembley pitch before losing the FA Cup final to Manchester United in 1996 – the year Rush left – somehow epitomised the sense of entitlement, earning that generation the 'Spice Boys' image they laboured under for years.

'If I had been a senior player at Liverpool at the time, I would have stopped that happening,' Carragher reflected. 'As a senior player, you have to be thinking of the bigger picture. What if we lose? I cant believe nobody thought about that.'

It didn't help that the world of top-flight football was becoming a far more complicated, cosmopolitan, lavish place by then. In the glory years, Paisley even viewed signing southerners as a risk. Liverpool could get away with being tight-fisted payers, securing the best players on the back of the club's reputation.

Unlike Paisley, Souness handled pay talks himself and was infuriated by older squad members who wanted more of the money suddenly sloshing around the game in the early Premier League years. He let some go whom he might have kept.

There were some questionable judgement calls, too, in those inflationary times. Nigel Clough, Paul Stewart, Torben Piechnik and Istvan Kozma were not the best signings. While the Boot Room philosophy enshrined a collectivism into buying players – the coaches wiled away long afternoons in the windowless room, chewing the fat, all having their say – there was less thought, more frenzy about how Liverpool went about rebuilding a team which had been allowed to age by the time Souness took over from Dalglish in 1991.

Men in White Suits relates the extraordinary stories of how Peter Schmeichel actually wrote to the club.

'I am a Danish goalkeeper who has been a Liverpool supporter all my life. I am willing to pay for my own travel expenses. Can I come to Melwood for a week's trial?' But Souness was worried there would be scenes with Bruce Grobbelaar. The request was ignored.

When Michel Platini approached Souness after a UEFA Cup game against Auxerre to tip him off about a brilliant, difficult French player who was available, Souness said he was 'too busy fighting fire' to take on more trouble.' So the Eric Cantona opportunity was passed up, too.

That those two players should have been the mainstays of the side which eclipsed Liverpool only compounded the agony. United were more fleet of foot in every conceivable way. They were becoming a commercial juggernaut in a way that Liverpool were not. Their chairman Martin Edwards hired Edward Freedman, the commercial executive who had already transformed Tottenham's financial fortunes by then and watched him do the same for United.

Liverpool saw this. Robinson warned when Souness arrived of United's commercial potential if they could actually start winning. But they did not react as they might.

Liverpool's entrenched ways of doing things made it harder to modernise in the way that Arsenal did, with Arsene Wenger's arrival.

Carragher describes Ronnie Moran, one of Paisley' lieutenants, bristling when Roy Evans brought in a new coach, Andy Clarke, to build the players' aerobic capacity. When Souness tried to have the strong lager the players used to have on a bus on a Friday for away games replaced with a weaker one, there was resistance.

The club found themselves stuck between the past and the present, unable to know which of the two to follow, even appointing Roy Evans and Gerard Houllier as joint managers for 18 games in 1998. Liverpool had one excellent season in that first decade – 1996-97 under Evans – but by then the United dynasty was being built and they had know-how everywhere.

When Rush became available in 1988, it was Ferguson – not Dalglish – who was first on the phone to ask him to join United. 'He seemed to know everything about who was available before anyone,' says Rush.

Rafa Benitez restored the club's self-belief from 2004, recapturing the Champions League and building a team in which, with Fernando Torres and Xabi Alonso working in tandem with Steven Gerrard, offered the first serious threat to Ferguson in 2008. But United, parading Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney and Nemanja Vidic (whom Benitez missed out on) were on a different economic level.

The cataclysmic decision to sell the club to Tom Hicks and George Gillett during the Benitez years was certainly a major contributory factor to the road back being so long.

A Dubai International Capital deal fronted by Amanda Staveley, who has now brought the Saudis to Newcastle, had just collapsed when majority shareholder David Moores was panicked into accepting their disastrous leveraged buyout in 2007. It was a heist. By 2010 the club were close to insolvency, with the Americans struggling to refinance their loans.

The Glazers have rightly been maligned for their custodianship of United but there has been no existential threat like this. Ferguson and chief executive David Gill kept United on course at a time when the vast wealth of new owners - Roman Abramovich and Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al Nahyan – compounded the enormity of Liverpool's task.

The club's re-birth under Fenway Sports Group has been rapid but even that has taken time, with the initial Moneyball philosophy pursued by director of football Damien Comolli eventually giving out to a willingness to pay top dollar when necessary.

Brendan Rodgers almost became to Liverpool what a youthful Theo Epstein had been to Fenway's Boston Red Sox as they ended an 86-year wait for a baseball World Series in 2004. But Gerrard's fateful Anfield slip against Chelsea – with the club on the brink of ending a then 22-year wait for the title in 2012 - belied the fuller story of a club without an adequate defensive structure and unsustainably reliant on Luis Suarez.

Rodgers also wanted too much control over transfers.

Gregarious and demonstrative Jurgen Klopp could hardly differ more from gauche, uncommunicative Bob Paisley but the German has restored many of the old Liverpool ways. Cutting corners as Dicks did is no more acceptable than the 'three out of six' that Rush witnessed.

Thoughts will turn to next season, Liverpool building a hegemony to last years and - because Klopp will not be around forever - ensuring that this rise is not followed by a fall. They will be wise to guard against complacency.

'Ferguson once claimed that his greatest achievement in football was knocking Liverpool Football Club off its perch but that isn't really true,' Carragher reflected in Men in White Suits. 'Liverpool slipped away and United took advantage of the space at the top. The fall was self-inflicted.'