Liverpool Lift Another Trophy – This Team Are Serial Winners
Boom!
I published an article for TTT subscribers earlier this evening – written and published before Kepa's penalty landed 57 minutes later – and suddenly thought I'd better send out the link via Substack as well. So, here it is.
But before getting onto that, I just wanted to add that I didn't think the League Cup could bring delirium – but after a week with a raised temperature and a virus (not Covid, tests suggest), that game felt pretty feverish. I had started to feel better before enduring what must have been two-and-a-half hours of knife-edge football, with even the penalties – in which all 11 Liverpool players scored – seeming like it wouldn't separate the two teams.
I'll hopefully write more this week about why I don't think domestic trophies breed success, but they can help ease some pressure on clubs with big expectations. And as one-off games, they can be great; the Leicester quarter-final was a classic, and adds to the cachet of this particular win, in a way that facing only lowly opposition cannot match. Yes, it's a lesser trophy, but the last rounds were against quality opposition. You can’t ignore that and just focus on who won what; how it gets won is vital. (That includes how clubs are funded and the advantages that brings.)
Liverpool Lift Another Trophy – This Team Are Serial Winners
I’m not much of a fan of the League Cup, but winning trophies against big rivals, on penalties, feels special; all the more so given that Liverpool had a perfectly fine goal chalked off in normal time, against a team who brought on about £400m of subs financed by an oligarch on the run.
It was a brilliant game (credit to both teams and their managers), albeit one the VAR sought to steal from the Reds; a bit like the title last night, with the utter nonsense in not giving Rodri virtually punching the ball as a penalty. This is what football gets when mixing with oil money. As some neutrals observed, it felt like the VAR was looking to find a reason to chalk off a goal that would be given almost every single other time. (What happened at Goodison last night needs a lot more explaining.)
Football (and life) has been strange these past two years, but it got stranger still, to be playing a game – days after the ending of the UK’s Covid restrictions, pandemic finally in retreat – against a club whose owner gained his obscene wealth via the very Russian despot who had just taken it upon himself to attack the Ukraine, and get his nuclear arsenal on standby. But football carries on, until it reaches the stadium door.
Chelsea’s mega-expensive keeper was introduced in the 119th minute to face the penalties, got near none of them, acted like a prize idiot, then blasted the deciding spot-kick over the bar and straight towards Liverpool; while the Reds’ Cork kid keeper scored the winner. Pure poetry.