by It was a telling moment, and also funny, at the beginning of extra time in this Carabao Cup final, a game which the Liverpool team won late so that it looked like the end of Friday night, club TV channel youth-. team matters, gangly kids with floppy hair veering around a half-deserted training ground, parents in the stands.
As the moments ticked away from the restart Liverpool players lined up near the halfway line. At that point the already established Chelsea team seemed to realize that this was the kind of thing we should be doing and we suddenly stepped in to create an even tighter blue bundle, like a clingy new couple offering an expressive show. of affection around the dinner table.
Related: Liverpool won the Carabao Cup as Van Dijk’s extra-time header went past Chelsea
It happened again in the next interval, this time even more wildly, full team huddle, as one of the Derbyshire games of the village bladder-ball broke out in the middle of the final. And at that moment it felt like a perfect miniature, an emblem of what is the Chelsea FC football entity, basically some men chucked together without thought or chemistry; and like more than ever here the most salutary lesson in waste, greed, and how not to build an excellent sports team.
There are two things worth saying about Chelsea’s 1-0 win over Liverpool at Wembley. First of all, it ended up being a huge shock to everyone involved. This was a game Chelsea should have won, yet another game they managed to pull off instead was a performance that lacked teeth or any kind of in-game impact from Mauricio Pochettino.
In fact it could well be one game from the pack given the steady past season. Chelsea are still in one cup, at least until midweek, as they flounder in the league, although even with the win here they went from 10th to 11th in the table. Could any other manager, tasked with making this haphazard collection of human talent look like a coherent sporting entity, fare better? Would anyone who had a chance want the job?
Chelsea weren’t terrible here. They were just vague, weird, hard to read or understand. This is a team without telling. This is a random energy machine. For very short periods they were suddenly good, purposeful, producing small, peaceful passages. Then just as suddenly, they fell apart, or sank back into inertia.
But then we have never really seen a football team like this, together with such mania, so deliberately and clumsily against any existing notions of continuity, the human scale, ideas about how could the pieces fit together.
Indeed, the only truly recognizable part of this Chelsea win was the sense of an old-fashioned bottle job, the drop of the ball and the line in his sights. They came into this game as second choice. But scan the team sheets at the start and Chelsea had a much more impressive team here, man for man, although the word “team” must be used advisedly when referring to a collection of players with no coherent internal architecture .
But in theory everything fell Chelsea’s way here. Liverpool had at least 10 first team players out at the start. Shall we round that, sir, to the full 11? After 26 minutes, Ryan Gravenberch sprained his ankle in a terrible way, which added to the pain because his ankle happened to be under the studs of Moisés Caicedo. He went on a stretcher. Liverpool gave up their reign.
Related: Pochettino hits back at Gary Neville’s Chelsea ‘billion dollar bottle job’ jibe
And by the middle of the second half this multifaceted multi-billion pound, non-team of all talents, was competing against a team of alumni from the youth team, filled in enthusiastic and talented. By the time Virgil van Dijk scored the winning goal and a penalty was in the offing Bobby Clark, James McConnell and Jayden Danns were flying over him, energetic kids out there having the time of their lives. In contrast, the player Van Dijk to tackle the score was Mykhailo Mudryk, basically a YouTube player signed as a pound, another human part thrown into this random football generator.
It’s ironic that Chelsea even play this final because their ownership model basically doesn’t want this competition to exist, but instead wants to be doing things sharper with their midweek. Win this and Chelsea would have entered the Europa League. Can they even play there? Will Uefa, with their stricter FFP rules, really allow it to be done?
For all that, they played well at times. Cole Palmer had some nice moments. Conor Gallagher may have been very lucky. The players gave everything they had and were completely deflated at the end, Pochettino close to tears.
As ever this victory, like all Chelsea victories at the moment, is about ownership, about the business plan, about the financial arrogance of the beat-the-market spending spree, about always believing that you are the one is always smart. the room. Chelsea had a chance to turn all that energy into something tangible here, to seize the moment. It happened because they met a more coherent sports entity, with more will, deeper equipment. So far, the thing is still a bust.
