There was an impressive and also quite funny moment at the start of extra time in this Carabao Cup final; A late win by the Liverpool team was so exhausted that the club TV channel on Friday night looked like the end of youth matches. team work, skinny kids with floppy hair wandering around on a semi-deserted training ground, parents in the stands.
As the minutes approached for the restart, Liverpool’s players gathered near the midfield line. At this point the Chelsea team, already in formation, seemed to realize that this was actually what we needed to do, and suddenly they swooped in to form an even tighter, more honest blue group, like a sticky new couple putting on a performance show. Loving around the dinner table.
Relating to: Van Dijk’s extra-time header sinks Chelsea as Liverpool win Carabao Cup
It happened again the next interval, this time even more frantically, with the full squad coming together as if one of those Derbyshire village bladderball games had broken out midway through the final. And in that moment, it felt like a perfect miniature, a symbol of what the Chelsea FC football team is; basically some guys were thrown together without any thought or chemistry; More than ever, it looks like the most useful lesson in waste, greed, and how not to build an elite sports team.
There are two things worth saying about Chelsea’s 1-0 defeat to Liverpool at Wembley. First, it was a real shock to everyone involved. This was a game that Chelsea really should have won, but instead it was a game in which they produced a performance devoid of teeth or any in-game influence from Mauricio Pochettino.
Indeed, given his steady decline on the season, he may be one game away from the sack. Chelsea are still in a cup and uncertain pace in the league until at least midweek, but despite the defeat here they have moved up from 10th to 11th in the table. Could another manager tasked with making this random collection of human talents look like a coherent sporting entity do better? Would anyone with a chance want this job?
Chelsea weren’t bad here. They were just vague, weird, hard to read or understand. This is a team without a story. This is a random energy machine. For very short periods of time they suddenly became well-intentioned, purposeful, and produced exciting little passages. Then, just as suddenly, they dispersed or sank back into torpor.
But we have never seen a football team put together with such frenzy, so deliberately and clumsily defying existing notions of continuity, of human scale, of how parts might fit together.
In fact, the only truly recognizable part of this defeat at Chelsea was the old-fashioned sense of bottle business, the dropping of the ball leaving the line in front of their eyes. They entered this match as second favourites. But take a look at the team sheets at the start and Chelsea clearly had a more famous team here, man-to-man, but the word “squad” needs to be used deliberately when talking about a collection of players without a coherent internal architecture.
But in theory everything is in Chelsea’s hands here. Liverpool initially had at least 10 first-team players available. Shall we round this to exactly 11, sir? With 26 minutes remaining, Ryan Gravenberch rolled his ankle in horrific fashion, made even more painful by the fact that his ankle was under Moisés Caicedo’s studs at the time. He set off on a stretcher. Liverpool gave up on their management.
Relating to: Pochettino responds to Gary Neville’s Chelsea ‘billion pound bottle business’ joke
And by midway through the second half this multi-billion pound collection, the non-squad side of all talent, was competing against a team made up of youth team graduates and eager and talented substitutes. When Virgil van Dijk scored the winning goal in the penalty shootout, among the people who fell for him were Bobby Clark, James McConnell and Jayden Danns; Energetic children having the best time of their lives. In contrast, the player Van Dijk needed to pounce to score was Mykhailo Mudryk; this was a YouTube player signed as a bet, this was just another human piece thrown into the random football generator.
There was an irony in Chelsea even playing this final, as the ownership model fundamentally doesn’t want this rivalry to exist, instead wanting to do bigger things with their midweek. Had they won this, Chelsea would have qualified for the Europa Conference League. Can they play in it? Will UEFA, with its stricter FFP rules, really allow this?
Despite all this, they played well from time to time. Cole Palmer had his moments. Conor Gallagher could have won with a little luck. The players gave it everything they had and by the end they were completely demoralised, leaving Pochettino almost in tears.
As always, this defeat, like all Chelsea’s defeats now, is about ownership, about the business plan, about the sheer bro financier arrogance of a market-beating spending spree, about always believing you’re the smartest man on the market. room. Chelsea had a chance to turn all that energy into something tangible to seize the moment. They passed because they encountered a sports community that was more consistent, with greater will and deeper equipment. For now this thing remains a flop.