How leader Lucas Leiva can finally prove himself to Anfield faithful

It’s been a month of unexpected delights for Lucas Leiva. Having not previously started a league game in midfield all season, he’s played five of the last six. Odder still, in those five games he’s racked up as many assists – three – as he managed in his previous 163 career outings.

That’s clearly little more than a statistical quirk, but it's one that reflects the Brazilian’s recent renaissance, and his sudden centrality to a squad of which he has spent much of the past few years languishing on the peripheries. It also follows a pattern that has cropped up with clockwork regularity during his 10-year career on Merseyside: the ability to play himself into the plans of a manager who only recently had little use for him.

Lucas has had a strange decade at Liverpool, his importance to the side seeming to rise and fall in directly inverse relation to the standard of the team at large. When he first arrived, Rafa Benitez’s imperious engine-room trio of Mascherano-Alonso-Gerrard offered little chance for a place in the side, and indeed Lucas’s relative inadequacy was touted as one of the reasons that Liverpool failed to win the league. With Alonso and Gerrard both missing big chunks of the 2008/09 season through injury, the 21-year-old Lucas was unable to replicate either the silky puppeteering of the former or the match-winning dynamism of the latter, and was booed by swaths of the Liverpool fans on a handful of regrettable occasions.

“When the team are on a bad run, it will always be two or three players people will blame, that’s the nature of human beings,” Leiva said earlier this year. “For a few years – and sometimes I still feel it – when I’m involved and we lose a game I know that people will blame me.” Way to go, Famous Anfield Crowd!

As the Benitez reign went south and duties were taken over by the witless Roy Hodgson, the team plummeted like a wounded bird – and yet Lucas’s own form quickly transformed into a model of distinction, by now the senior holding midfielder, with Mascherano and Alonso having been sold off, and arguably the only established player to distinguish himself amid the turmoil of the time.

When Hodgson was replaced by Kenny Dalglish in 2010, and the side steadied at around the upper-midtable mark, it’s no hyperbole to say that Lucas was the Premier League’s outstanding defensive midfielder for a good year or so. The high point came against Manchester City in November 2011, when he went toe-to-toe with peak-era Yaya Toure and played the Ivorian off the park. It was a performance of bona fide brilliance and one that hinted at seriously great things. Two days later, in a League Cup fixture, he ruptured his anterior cruciate ligament and didn’t kick a ball for nine months.

“To be honest in a few moments I thought I couldn't come back any more or even walk,” he said. “The way my knee looked, I felt scared.” He was right to be: as the cliche goes, he's never been the same player since.

The story of his career after that most feared of injuries is neither wholly heartwarming nor wholly tragic, but has definite shades of both. On the one hand he has fought back to prove himself an asset to two managers and to earn the unconditional acclaim of that pesky Anfield crowd. And yet, in truth, the injury put paid to Lucas as a genuinely first-rate screening player at precisely the time he was blossoming into exactly that. He was playing with an authority and experience that would likely have seen him inherit the club captaincy, too.

Instead, he lapsed back into a familiar pattern: progressively less involved as the team soared, then sunk, under Brendan Rodgers; reinstated by Jurgen Klopp but then ushered to the sidelines once again as the German's high-intensity blueprint has taken shape this season.

It's a sequence that from a certain angle looks unflattering: a footballer who looks great surrounded by middling team-mates but fades into the background whenever the standard gets ramped up.

There's perhaps a degree of truth in that. But Lucas’s penchant for saving his best form for the team's lowest moments also speaks towards a certain kind of leadership, a willingness to muck in when times are tough, that has been largely absent from Liverpool in recent years. Under Rodgers and even Klopp, Liverpool have been a momentum team: great when playing well, but desperately unable to arrest spells of declining form. Lucas, on the other hand, seems to function on a kind of anti-momentum, hitting his peaks as those around him begin to trough.

With Lucas back in the side and his curious creative purple patch having put the finish line for Champions League qualification well in sight, that Anfield faithful would be especially grateful if his form continued to dovetail with his team's, just for another few weeks.