Liverpool has been left casting around for explanations after a meek Wembley defeat to Newcastle in the Carabao Cup final. Before a ball had even been kicked, Newcastle coach Jason Tindall put forward one possible answer.
While the Carabao Cup may not be the most prestigious trophy in the game, everyone wants to win it once you get to the final. Last year, Jurgen Klopp’s kids produced a heroic effort to claim the title, which will go down as one of the best of his reign.
But Arne Slot will now need to wait a little longer for his first Liverpool trophy, having failed to retain the crown. Federico Chiesa sparked a degree of late hope, but the fact he was even on the pitch shows that the likes of Mohamed Salah, Luis Diaz, Diogo Jota and Darwin Nunez had failed to deliver.
It’s also only fair to examine the service they received. They were feeding off scraps against Newcastle until Slot made an emergency change that saw Liverpool go down to one orthodox center-back, and even that only somewhat improved the approach play.
This was clearly not Liverpool at anything like its best. This, after all, is the runaway leader of the Premier League, but you certainly wouldn’t have known it.
So where did it all go wrong? Tindall, Newcastle’s vociferous assistant manager, has a theory that he put to Jamie Redknapp before kick-off.
“I spoke to Jason Tindall before the game,” Redknapp revealed on Sky Sports. “He went, “it couldn’t have gone better for us really, the fact that [Liverpool] had to go to the wire on Tuesday [against PSG] and make it so difficult for them.”
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“They felt they could use that to their advantage if they started well and got after Liverpool. And that’s exactly what they did.”
Certainly, a gruelling 120 minutes in midweek against a team as good and intense as PSG will not have helped Liverpool. The Reds did not surrender their European dream without a fight, meaning it was a really draining contest at Anfield.
But the manner of Newcastle’s win at Wembley doesn’t completely support this theory. Liverpool was not particularly blitzed by intensity and high pressure — Eddie Howe managed to disrupt Slot’s build-up with a solid out-of-possession game plan, but the match was not defined by high turnovers or overwhelming black and white waves of pressure.
Neither side had really created anything of note before Dan Burn’s emphatic header from a corner on the stroke of half-time. Energy was not the obvious difference between the two sides.
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If fatigue played a part, it was more of a long-term issue than just a hangover from PSG. Liverpool’s duel success rate has been gradually dropping for weeks and weeks, with a long campaign taking its toll on a relatively small playing squad.
It’s a subtle difference, perhaps. But to the extent that energy levels settled the contest, they stopped Liverpool from imposing its game plan, rather than allowing Newcastle to do anything special with its approach.
In a sport of such fine margins, Tindall and Newcastle were always going to be pleased about how the PSG game panned out. But Liverpool must undertake a more comprehensive analysis of where the game was won and lost, or else it risks losing control of the remainder of its season — and missing the issues that need to be fixed in the summer.
