With France and Spain going head-to-head in a World Cup semi-final tonight, one former Liverpool man will almost certainly be watching with a complicated set of feelings. Nicolas Anelka's relationship with major tournaments did not end well. That is putting it mildly.

Anelka spent the 2001 season on loan at Anfield, making 22 appearances, scoring five goals and chipping in with three assists. It was a brief chapter in a career that also took in Chelsea, Manchester City and Arsenal, collecting Premier League and Champions League winners' medals along the way. As footballing CVs go, it is genuinely impressive. Yet when his name comes up in conversation, the subject almost always drifts towards one dressing room in South Africa and one catastrophic half-time exchange.

The 2010 World Cup was already wobbling for France by the time they faced Mexico in their second group match. They were not playing well. Goals had dried up. Tension was building. Then, at half-time with the score goalless, manager Raymond Domenech walked into the dressing room and, according to Anelka, directed his frustration squarely at the striker by name.

What followed was the kind of row that ends careers.

"I was frustrated going into the locker room," Anelka later recalled. "I was thinking to myself, 'I'm not getting the ball, I'm not finding a solution. We're playing badly, it's 0-0 and we still haven't scored.' All of a sudden, the coach came in and called me out by name. When he called out my name with all that pent-up frustration it just came out because I didn't like it. I didn't like that he called me out by name as if I were guilty, as if it were all my fault."

His own words paint the picture clearly enough. "I took it as an attack. It was a big mistake. He had to know I was frustrated. He had to know I was a volcano about to erupt."

And erupt he did. The fallout was immediate and dramatic. Anelka was removed from the squad and told the path back was simple enough, just apologise. He refused. Then something quite remarkable happened. His teammates, rather than distancing themselves from the whole mess, did the opposite. They went on strike and refused to train in solidarity with their dismissed colleague.

France, a nation that had won the European Championship as recently as 2000, with Anelka himself part of that squad, descended into chaos at the biggest tournament in football. They limped out at the group stage, managing just one goal across their matches. A proud footballing nation humiliated not by the opposition but by themselves.

The French Football Federation were not inclined towards leniency once the dust settled. Anelka received an 18-match ban from international football. For a player who had earned 69 caps and scored 14 goals for his country, it was a brutal full stop. He never pulled on the France shirt again.

The punishment did not stop with Anelka, either. Incoming manager Laurent Blanc, tasked with rebuilding whatever remained of French football's credibility, suspended every member of the World Cup squad for their part in the training strike ahead of his first match in charge against Norway. The entire group paid a price for the chaos that had unfolded.

Anelka continued his club career after 2010 before eventually retiring in 2016 at the age of 36. His international story, though, had been written in South Africa with words that could not be taken back.

It is a strange footnote to Liverpool's history that the man at the centre of one of international football's most infamous implosions once called Anfield home, even briefly. For a single season, he was ours. What came later was something else entirely.

With France back on the biggest stage tonight, the contrast with that summer in South Africa could hardly be sharper, and it will be fascinating to see whether this generation can write a rather more dignified ending to their tournament story.