At the tail end of September 2002, Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson was a man under pressure. Or, at least, that was how it was being portrayed in the press.
Arsene Wenger's Arsenal had won the Premier League at Old Trafford the season before and now United were six points behind the Gunners, after winning just three of their opening seven features, losing twice in the process.
Former Liverpool defender Alan Hansen claimed that Ferguson was facing "the greatest challenge of his career".
His fellow Scot, though, was having none of it.
"My greatest challenge is not what's happening at the moment," a defiant Ferguson told The Guardian. "My greatest challenge was knocking Liverpool right off their f*cking perch. And you can print that."
Ferguson was understandably proud of the fact that United had usurped the Merseysiders as the dominant force in English football. At the time, they had won seven top-flight titles in the time since Liverpool's most recent triumph, in 1990.
However, Ferguson didn't knock the Reds off their perch; United's rise to power merely coincided with Liverpool's fall from grace.
When the Reds clinched the First Division championship with a 2-1 win over QPR on April 28, 1990, there appeared to be no end in sight to their domestic dominance.
It was a record-extending 18th title, 10 of which had arrived in the preceding 14 years. However, while it may not have seemed like it from the outside, Liverpool's players were struggling.
"The last time we won the league (1989-90), we were in decline from the team the year before," versatile defender Steve Nicol told the42.ie.
"There’s no way we played half as well or with the same passion or commitment that year. That’s when [the decline] started."
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The mental strain of sustaining success can be enormous but Liverpool's issues were more emotional.
The Hillsborough tragedy, the 1989 stadium crush which had claimed the lives of 96 Liverpool fans, had affected the players deeply, far more than they were willing to admit, even to themselves.
"Three years of being unable to focus properly,” Nicol explained. “Three years of playing in a bubble. Three years on autopilot.
"It was hard to realise that was the case at the time. Impossible, in fact. Trying, and failing, to deal with the aftermath was obviously having an effect but nobody knew how to properly cope with it."
Kenny Dalglish was arguably hit hardest of all.
The Scot is not only a legend on Merseyside for his remarkable feats at Anfield as a player and a manager; he is arguably even more adored for his reaction to Hillsborough.
Dalglish went out of his way to comfort the families of the victims, attending up to four funerals a day. However, he refused to publicly speak about the tragedy – it would be 20 years before he would break his silence on what happened that day in Sheffield – and it took its toll.
Dalglish sensationally resigned as manager on February 22, 1991, two days after a 4-4 draw with Everton at Goodison Park.
"We had all come in for training and were told to meet in the dressing room," striker Ian Rush told The Guardian. "Kenny walked in and said he was leaving.
"It was complete shock and surprise in there. He couldn't say too much but there were tears in his eyes as he spoke."
Dalglish was mentally shattered.
A man who had barely drank during his playing career found himself increasingly taking comfort in alcohol, while he had been taking medical injections to deal with a rash that had left his body covered in blotches long before he stood down.
“In truth, I had wanted to leave Anfield in 1990, a year before I eventually resigned," he revealed in his autobiography 'Dalglish'.
"In the 22 months between Hillsborough and my resignation, the strain kept growing until I finally snapped.”
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He subsequently admitted regretting his decision to walk away for good and would have been willing to return after taking two weeks off.
However, even though Liverpool chief executive Peter Robinson said the door would remain open for Dalglish's return, he never got in touch.
"The club had other ideas, clearly," the former forward said, "and went in another direction."
The proved a calamitous mistake.
Dalglish's resignation coupled with the appointment of Graeme Souness as his successor proved the pivotal moment in Liverpool's 30-year title drought.
As Jamie Carragher later told a number of papers in 2010, "If I were in [Ferguson’s] company, I would also tell him, first off, that Manchester United never knocked Liverpool off their perch, as he put it. That’s just nonsense. Graeme Souness did that.
"When United were going for their first title under Ferguson in 1992-93, they were competing with Norwich and Aston Villa. They weren’t competing with Liverpool, were they?"
Indeed, Arsenal and Leeds United had won the previous two titles, while Liverpool were coming off the back of a sixth-placed finish when the Premier League began – it was the first time they'd finished outside the top two since 1981.
So, the Reds were certainly no longer among England's elite by the time Manchester United won their first championship in 25 years.
Souness had taken over for the end of the 1990-91 season, winning three of his first five matches in charge as the Reds finished a distant second to Arsenal.
It was widely accepted that Liverpool's squad was in need of rejuvenation and Souness deserves credit for putting his faith in the likes of Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman and Jamie Redknapp.
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However, the majority of his moves in the transfer market were disastrous.
Steven Staunton, Ray Houghton and, most bafflingly of all, Peter Beardsley were discarded far too prematurely and not adequately replaced.
"You could feel it in training," midfielder Jan Molby told Goal. "Previously, we had trained to a high level, but soon it was apparent that some of these new players couldn't do that."
Indeed, Dean Saunders was bought for £2.9m but promptly sold to Aston Villa after failing to justify his English-record fee.
Paul Stewart proved one of the biggest flops in Liverpool's history, while more money was wasted on the likes of Nigel Clough, Mark Walters and Torben Piechnik.
The signing of Julian Dicks perhaps best summed up Souness' erroneous faith in tenacity over technique, which ultimately cost the manager his job.
The biggest mistake Souness had made during his time in charge, though, was doing an exclusive interview with The Sun, a newspaper boycotted on Merseyside because of its coverage of the Hillsborough tragedy, after his recovery from heart surgery in April 1992.
Consequently, while Liverpool went on to win the FA Cup that season, there was little sympathy for Souness when he stood down in January 1994 after successive sixth-placed finishes in his two full seasons at the helm.
The supporters' animosity towards Souness has eased somewhat in recent years. The man himself is well aware that he "made mistakes", admitting that he "will regret the decision [to do an interview with The Sun] forever. I don't have a defence."
He also acknowledges that he botched his rebuilding job. His disciplinarian approach proved counter-productive. The former midfielder clashed with old team-mates angling for new contracts, while the modern game's emerging talents were not receptive to his old-school approach.
"I was blinded by my feelings for Liverpool," he explained in the book Men in White Suits. "I expected my players to feel the same as me. But the world was changing. Players were expecting a shoulder to cry on. The players were holding more power than the manager.
"I wasn’t cute enough sometimes, or political enough."
To make Souness solely responsible for Liverpool's decline would be wrong, though.
Things weren't just going badly on the field. He wasn't the only person at the club who failed to appreciate the way in which the game, as well as the world, was changing.
Liverpool as a football club failed to adapt.
The Reds had been one of the driving forces behind the creation of the Premier League, which launched in 1992, yet they had actually failed to fully grasp its potential for revolutionising the English game.
When Souness resigned, Liverpool tried to return to the old 'Boot Room' mentality which had provided the foundation for their unprecedented era of success by hiring Roy Evans as his replacement.
The problem was, though, that Liverpool's ideas of how to run a football club were also rooted in the past.
"Liverpool did not want to admit that football was becoming a business," former forward Ronnie Rosenthal claimed in Men in White Suits. "The board was focused only on football and it missed out."
Indeed, while Liverpool were coming to terms with the post-Dalglish era, Manchester United were shrewdly taking advantage of Ferguson's managerial genius by taking the first steps towards turning the club into a commercial colossus.
"Manchester United's chairman Martin Edwards was a visionary and a he could see the way football was going," Rosenthal argued.
Under Edwards, and thanks to the excellent work of the likes of David Gil, United became the symbol of the Premier League era, taking full advantage of the increased exposure provided by Sky TV's coverage of England's top flight, which perfectly tapped into the feel-good factor generated by, first, Italia 90 and then, Euro 96.
With its snazzy new packaging, high-octane football and full stadia, the Premier League also became a global phenomenon – as did United, who were pioneers when it came to overseas pre-season tours, merchandising and sponsorship deals.
The more money they made, the more titles they won and the more popular they became. It was a symbiotic cycle of success.
Liverpool were still the most successful club in English football yet they had been left trailing in United's wake, becoming something of an irrelevance due to their lack of participation in the Champions League – the other great money-spinner launched in 1992.
By the time of Ferguson's boast in 2002, United were generating more revenue on an annual basis than any other club in the world and nearly £70 million more than their north-west rivals.
Liverpool remained a major name in the game but were still struggling to marry a more modern approach with their traditional values.
As David Moores, who took over as the club's chairman in 1991, later confessed in a letter to The Times, "In the wake of Euro 96 with the influx of more and more overseas superstars on superstar wages, I was aware the game was changing beyond all recognition and deeply worried, too, about my ability to continue underwriting the financial side.
"I was from the ever-decreasing pool of old-school club owners, the locally based, locally wealthy supporter like Jack Walker who stuck his money in out of his passion for the club.
"Football clubs were beginning to be seen as a source of profit rather than a source of pride; they were as much financial institutions as they were sporting legacies. The (Roman) Abramovich era was upon us, and I knew that I could never compete."
And so, Liverpool fell further and further behind from a commercial perspective - in spite of the good work done on the field by managers such as Gerard Houllier and Rafael Benitez - with Moores' decision to sell the club to George Gillett and Tom Hicks in 2007 nearly resulting in the Reds going bankrupt three years later.
Only now, under the ownership of Fenway Sports Group and, more importantly, the management of Jurgen Klopp, are Liverpool poised to reclaim their place at the summit of English football.
Ferguson may have kept them off that perch for years, but Liverpool fell all by themselves.