Stoke City 0 Liverpool 0:FRIDAY'S CHIDE was full of anger, scripted, staged and delivered with a voice that creaked under the strain of pent-up irritation. Saturday's attack was full of humour, with off-the-cuff jibes and a theatrical zeal revealing yet another rarely seen side to Rafael Benitez.

The Liverpool manager, far from wilting at the Premier League coalface, appears, to use Kevin Keegan parlance, to be loving this feud with Alex Ferguson. But his players could not have chosen a worse time to cower.

Interpretations of Benitez's decision to turn against the authority of his Manchester United adversary have been wide and wild since the first grenade was thrown towards Old Trafford.

Some claim the calculating Spaniard is only a mullet short of repeating Keegan's emotional collapse of 1996. Others have heralded his press conference performance as calm and methodical, even though they were not present to witness him jabbing the underside of a table as he spoke. Neither theory is watertight.

Ferguson's frequent asides on Liverpool's title prospects have enraged Benitez for several months and, no doubt to the United manager's satisfaction, provoked another entertaining response. Yet Benitez has a history of picking only the fights he believes he can win, and it was no coincidence he publicised a list of grievances against the Scot with Liverpool in the strongest domestic position of his five-season reign.

His political results are mixed. At Valencia he raged against the director of football, Jesus Garcia Pitarch, when "I asked for a sofa and they bought me a standard lamp". That was at a time when, from another position of strength, Benitez sought greater control over transfer matters at the club but quit with that battle lost and his position undermined as Valencia began to tout for replacements.

Intriguingly, greater control over transfers is the issue stalling his new contract at Liverpool.

The fight he has chosen with Ferguson, however, will not be decided by the United manager's words but by the actions of the Liverpool players over the final months of the season. Only then will the merits of Benitez's game be revealed.

"I don't have a plan, maybe he (Ferguson) has a plan," he protested, only to add: "I will tell you in three months' time if I've achieved what I wanted."

In that respect Liverpool's response at Stoke City represented a first-round retreat; a lacklustre offering that should be grateful for the lack of class in Tony Pulis' attack for the point it received. It is not beyond the realms of possibility that Benitez criticised Ferguson for a second day simply to detract from such a sterile performance, though he was right to distinguish between his pre-match comments and what followed at the Britannia Stadium.

"It didn't make any difference for the team. It doesn't matter if you talk in a press conference," he insisted. "We were at the top of the table, we wanted to win. For the players it was the same situation. The only thing was that Mr Ferguson was talking too much about Liverpool and for a long time, so I think it was the right moment to say enough is enough, and a lot of people think the facts I put on the table are right."

Save for a promising start and desperate finale, when Steven Gerrard struck the woodwork with a free-kick plus a flick beyond Thomas Sorensen in injury-time, Liverpool were out-fought.

Rory Delap should have hurt the visitors with more than just his formidable throws when he struck the bar from six yards, while Dave Kitson squandered two glorious chances to give Stoke the lead in the second half. The first, when he struck the side-netting from a difficult angle, indicated why the striker is yet to open his account for Stoke and Pulis hopes to sign James Beattie from Sheffield United.

Stoke's central-midfield pairing of Glenn Whelan and Amdy Faye overpowered Liverpool's South American axis of Lucas and Javier Mascherano, with Xabi Alonso sorely missed. Mascherano was frequently careless in possession and is in a permanent strop at present.

This was not a dish to serve before a king or, in this case, the watching Diego Maradona. All that effort to exchange the wild life for sobriety and this is the Argentina coach's reward; freezing at a non-event in Stoke? To paraphrase Benitez's condemnation of Ferguson, it doesn't seem fair.