Liverpool beat Chelsea in the EFL Cup final

The first valuable prize of the English season went to championship leader Liverpool. In the English League Cup final he beat Chelsea 1:0 in extra time. The value of this victory was added by the fact that the Liverpudlians won it despite a colossal number of losses, due to which at the end of the match they had a whole group of young reserves fighting in their composition.

This match at London’s Wembley did not hint at a desire to be included in the ranking of the most exciting English League Cup finals, and some of its melancholy could be explained by the all too obvious problems faced by both of its participants. In the case of Chelsea – a deeper and more global crisis, in which the team, despite colossal cash injections, found itself last season and which has not gone away this year, hence the tenth place in the English Championship, 25 -a point gap from the leading Sunday opponent. In the case of Liverpool – rather momentary and quite specific. In recent months, several European football giants overloaded with a calendar have become aware of the epidemic of injuries to leading players. For the Liverpudlians, in February, it acquired such enormous proportions that a team made up of recovering football players would be much more similar to the core than the one that faced Chelsea. Neither Mohamed Salah, nor Darwin Nunez, nor Diogo Jota, nor Joel Matip, nor Dominik Szoboszlai, nor Trent Alexander-Arnold entered the field. Almost the entire attack, the main goalkeeper, were lost, the flanks and key areas in the middle of the field and defense were damaged.

And this terrible list grew even bigger in the middle of the first half. Moisés Caicedo crashed into Ryan Gravenberch, the Liverpool midfielder had to be carried out onto the turf on a stretcher, and Conor Bradley, a 20-year-old with minimal big-game experience who had been plugging a hole on the right where Alexander-Arnold usually flies back and forth, found himself forced to plug a new hole in the middle of the field.

Shortly before this episode, which added another dose of pain to the apparently constantly aching head of Liverpool coach Jurgen Klopp, Chelsea, until now completely unprepossessing, suddenly snapped back with a most dangerous attack with a successful rebound for Cole Palmer. Palmer hit from point-blank range, so that it seemed to break the net. But Alisson’s understudy Quivin Kelleher showed amazing reaction speed. Only hockey goalies move to an empty corner with lightning speed.

And after Gravenberch was evacuated, and Caicedo took a breath, not seeing a red card in front of him, Chelsea made an even more interesting attack. Raheem Sterling even finished it off with a goal, but it seems he quickly realized that Nicholas Jackson, who was passing the ball to him, had gone offside a little, a third of the way, before running into the gap.

A quarter of an hour after the break, VAR helped Chelsea. While those Liverpudlians for whom attack is the main mission were not going well, the defenders turned on. Andy Robertson crossed from a set piece, Virgil van Dijk jumped over Ben Chilwell and headed the ball into the net. At first glance, there was nothing to complain about in the episode. But a few minutes of careful study forced the team of referees led by Chris Kavanaugh to cancel the goal. And BBC experts debated for a long time whether he really should have paid attention to Wataru Endo’s formal “offside”, which supposedly, thanks to the convenient location, slightly prevented Levi Colwill from helping Chilwell, or whether it was still worth not giving a damn about such a trifle, given that Colwill was with Endo was separated from their partners by half a dozen meters.

And then there was real torture that Liverpool went through. Jurgen Klopp had to replace the exhausted players of the starting lineup, throw in those who are even younger than Conor Bradley, against whose background even he looks like a seasoned fighter – Bobby Clarke, James McConnell, Jayden Dunnes. Chelsea, naturally, pressed hard, but for some reason they could not push Liverpool through – either Quivin Kelleher, who was heroic that evening, or the goalposts stood in the way. So it went to extra time.

There was a feeling that the exhausted Liverpudlians would not be able to resist. But they held on. And in the second overtime, Konstantinos Tsimikas, another reserve, cut the ball from a corner to the near post, and Virgil van Dijk, jumping out from behind the London guards and playing ahead, cut it into the corner. It seems that the Liverpudlians were a little afraid to celebrate wildly. They were afraid that history would repeat itself with that Van Dijk goal that was suddenly cancelled. But no, there was no reason to quibble, and Wembley was lit up with scarlet flares, somehow carried into the stands by Liverpool fans.

Alexey Dospehov