Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are a great team with a need for more trophies | Barney Ronay


Chelsea stand in the way in a mouthwatering Carabao Cup final that could energise the rest of the season for the victor

And you shall know us by the trail of sponsors. The League Cup has always been a bird-on-a-wire kind of thing. Every year this fond old springtime ritual is menaced and marginalised and threatened with ever more imminent extinction, but still people keep turning up in February and March asking where the party is.

The title branding tells a story of that picaresque progress. In the space of 40 years, English football’s second-string domestic cup has gone from the quiet gravitas of being named after the entire Football League, through Coca-Cola, beer, electrical goods and the generic liquid “milk” into a holding pattern of insurance and financial products and now on to its current iteration as the global face of Thailand’s second-most popular energy drink.

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