If familiarity does, indeed, breed contempt then Anfield will be empty on Tuesday. This may well be the 15th time the two clubs have met since the semi-final, first leg in 2005, but tickets will still be as rare as Dirk Kuyt controlling a pass or Frank Lampard keeping his shirt on. No one wants to miss this game. The fans’ contempt will instead be reserved for their visiting fat cats from Uefa and for the way they have prostituted the purity of the Coupe des Clubs Champions Européen, giving us instead the bloated marketing opportunity that is the Uefa Champions League, the biggest misnomer since Hitler thought he could throw a Nazi Party.

Half of it is not a league (significantly, the half that attracts the greatest audience) and most of the teams in it aren’t champions. All this is designed to ensure that the latter stages are dominated by clubs with the largest fan base and a global reach, and that means teams from England, Spain and Italy. But there’s a price to pay — the integrity of the tournament. Neither of the two English winners since it was expanded in 1997-98 to include runners-up were national champions. Hypocritically, of course, I hope we’ll see a third in Moscow and Uefa made it easier for it to happen. Both Chelsea (against Rosenborg) and ourselves (Marseilles) have played stinkers at home this season, but the league format helped us both to progress. The old knockout format was incredibly tense; one slip and you were out. An in-form team could often make it all the way to the final, basking briefly in the glory of the greatest club game in the world. Alas, where now St Etienne?

And then there was the adventure of being drawn against the unknown, playing in Reykjavik, Lodz, Tbilisi and Trabzonspor. Apart from the odd jaunt to places like Bordeaux, a European campaign is now just a procession of the familiar. Since the Uefa Cup win in 2001 we’ve been to Rome, Eindhoven and Barcelona twice, Istanbul three times, and now London for the fourth.

Am I just an old romantic? I probably am. But say “The European Cup” to anyone who was 15 in the competition’s heyday (the 1970s) and their instinctive responses wouldn’t vary much from: “Real Madrid” or “Ajax”. With “Uefa Champions League”, I bet it’s “Amstel” or “Mastercard”.

So, Uefa, if we beat Chelsea for the third time, can we keep them?