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...
Pointedly left on the bench by Thomas Tuchel, the Belgian striker has rarely looked more peripheralStamford Bridge was a crisp, clear, boisterous place at kick-off in this last-16 first leg, the air crackling with a comforting midweek energy under those low white lights. And for the next 90 minutes two things happened.First up there was that unavoidable sense of wider turmoil. What a strange, fraught occasion this was for the world’s most guilelessly weaponised sport, another turn as the hot dog seller in the background of history, a bumbling tourist on the front line of world events. Continue reading...
Hate in the stadium does not stay in the stadium and we all have a responsibility to remember and actIf you have visited Stamford Bridge over the past years, you may well have spotted a 12-metre-tall mural, hanging high on the West Stand wall. Painted by the British-Israeli street artist Solomon Souza, it depicts three footballers: Julius Hirsch and Árpád Weisz, Jewish players murdered at Auschwitz, and Ron Jones, an English POW and Auschwitz survivor.Today, on the 77th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp, the world commemorates International Holocaust Remembrance Day. We honour Hirsch, Weisz and the millions of people who were brutally murdered, alongside the millions of others targeted and killed by the Nazis and their collaborators....