Not for the first time at Anfield in the past 12 months, the eyes were drawn last night towards two sixtysomething men in the directors’ box. No, not, thankfully, Liverpool’s pair of warring owners, one of whom preferred to stay in the United States to watch the Texas Rangers baseball team, but to Sir Alex Ferguson and Fabio Capello, who, sitting alongside each other, could only sit back and marvel at football played at a ferocious tempo that would once have horrified men of their generation.

At one point during the first half, as the pace dropped just a little, perhaps so that the poor Swedish referee could draw breath, Ferguson leant towards the new England manager and muttered something. Capello did not appear to comprehend — whether for reasons of dialect or, more likely, the incessant background noise — and so Ferguson gestured as if to say it was breathless out there. Capello nodded in recognition. It was breathless, all right.

When faced with this kind of assignment, with home advantage in a tense European tie, Rafael Benítez sends his Liverpool team out with the instruction to set a tempo that the opposition cannot live with. So how did Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, respond? By fighting fire with fire, by urging his players to ally their unrivalled technique with their often overlooked physical prowess. In those astonishing opening 20 minutes, when Arsenal threatened to run riot, it was Abou Diaby and Emmanuel Adebayor, two Africans whose talent is surpassed only by their physique, who were running the show.

And then, belatedly, Javier Mascherano, small of stature but enormous of heart, began to rattle Arsenal cages. When he clattered into Gilberto Silva in central midfield — Argentina against Brazil — even Tommy Smith, the old Anfield Iron, rubbed his hands with glee on his perch in the press box. It was Smith’s kind of game, but then it was everybody’s kind of game. Whether you are an aesthete, a strategist or an adrenalin junkie — and Ferguson likes to think of himself as all three — there was something for you here.

When players of a certain vintage try to dismiss the “nonsense” spoken by modern managers about the pace of English football these days, they should be given a tape — not a DVD, obviously — of this match to sit through. This was not football as they knew it. The worst thing that ever happened to that generation was the advent of nostalgia-based sports television channels. As classic matches from the archives are reshown, younger viewers can marvel at the talents of Kenny Dalglish or Liam Brady, but they can also see the outdated rules and the outlandish physiques that made for such a different spectacle.

One station recently showed a rerun of the most famous Liverpool-Arsenal clash of them all: that on May 26, 1989, when the London club needed a 2-0 victory at Anfield in the final match of the season to beat the Merseysiders to the League championship. It is remembered as a classic, but it was a stultifying spectacle as Liverpool’s defenders repeatedly passed the ball back to Bruce Grobbelaar to wind down the clock. With the back-pass rule still three years away, Grobbelaar would bowl the ball out and, within 20 seconds, it would be back in his hands. It was a misplaced sense of adventure that drew them out in the closing stages, only for Michael Thomas to score Arsenal’s decisive second goal deep into stoppage time, thus providing the most dramatic climax to a title race that England has seen.

Thomas was at Anfield last night to watch this tussle between his former clubs and at times he, too, only seven years after his retirement, must have reflected on the change that the sport has undergone since he, Jamie Redknapp and John Barnes patrolled the Liverpool midfield, passing the ball back and forth, rarely losing possession but rarely breaking sweat. They had Steve McManaman to do that for them and he, for all his running, was hardly renowned as a toiler.

Look at Benítez’s team, another decade on, and it is full of workhorses — Mascherano most obviously, but also Dirk Kuyt, Steven Gerrard and others. Before the match Wenger had cited Liverpool’s stamina — that of their supporters as well as their players — as something that Arsenal would have to match. At times they did so, with the introduction of Theo Walcott giving them the fresh legs that they needed to equalise late in the game. Liverpool raised the stakes yet again, the pace of Ryan Babel, another substitute, winning a penalty that Gerrard converted with aplomb. Stirring, compelling and utterly arresting stuff.

Tom Hicks, of course, was at the Rangers Ballpark in Arlington, watching, he said, on television in his private box. Even as a self-confessed baseball nut, he must have realised that his decision — like so many of them — utterly sucked.