Liverpool’s rookie goalkeeper was the calmest man in Wembley when he converted the decisive penalty in the shootoutWhen Trent Alexander-Arnold and Harvey Elliott converted their penalties in Liverpool’s flawless shootout they turned and pointed at a 23-year-old goalkeeper making the 17th start of his senior club career, and who just happened to be the calmest person inside Wembley. They shared the intuition that Jürgen Klopp had when deciding it would be Caoimhín Kelleher, not Alisson, standing in Liverpool’s goal for the Carabao Cup final.“If it works out, then it’s all about Caoimhín. If it doesn’t work out, then it’s all about me.” The Liverpool manager was correct, although he could never have predicted it would work out with Kelleher scoring...
Chelsea stand in the way in a mouthwatering Carabao Cup final that could energise the rest of the season for the victorAnd 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...
Weariness for Leeds and Spurs, sticky times for Lampard and the season’s first major silverwareAlthough it may be coincidence, someone far more observant than this column recently noticed that Southampton appear to have devised a clever, completely legal mid-game tactic that involves one of their players going down “injured” and in apparent need of medical attention between the 60th and 70th minute, at which point their teammates adjourn to the sideline to receive energy gels and tactical instruction from Ralph Hasenhüttl and his backroom team. Should it occur on Friday evening, we can but hope it won’t be the most interesting talking point to arise from their match against Norwich, but it has piqued our curiosity and is the first...
Liverpool manager’s commitment to domestic cups has been questioned but his delight at semi-final win was clearTo become a “true legend” at Liverpool, Pepijn Lijnders had claimed on the eve of the rearranged Carabao Cup semi-final, “you need to go for the national cups as well.” Jürgen Klopp’s assistant was not downplaying past glories but talking up the future of a Liverpool team that has evolved to the extent he expected it to punish Arsenal even without the cutting edge of Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané. Lijnders was talking of Liverpool’s hunger too, and it appeared he had written the script.A 2022 Carabao Cup winner’s medal will not define the Liverpool legacy of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Virgil van Dijk, Jordan Henderson...
Blues’ high-spec finely engineered – and very expensive – midfielders epitomised the gulf between Chelsea and SpursThere was a moment midway through the first half of this Carabao Cup semi-final second leg, with Chelsea already 1-0 up, when Jorginho and Mateo Kovacic just seemed to stop, shrug, and pass the ball three times between them: a kind of shared footballing shrug, a raise of the midfield eyebrows. We can do this all day you know. You’re on your own time here.This was a game Tottenham did their best to chase, and with some urgency in the second half. But they were up against opponents who seemed always to be holding them at arm’s length, a palm flat against their forehead,...