Jurgen Klopp’s farewell will be nauseating enough without us all buying into this underdog narrative. Liverpool beat Chelsea, as they should.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!“Goalless but not eventless,” was the eye-roll inducing assessment of our old pal Peter Drury at the end of a first half which featured a ridiculous save by Caoimhin Kelleher to deny Cole Palmer, Cody Gakpo hitting the post, a Chelsea goal ruled out for a tight offside, various other chances besides and another Liverpool injury, this time to Ryan Gravenberch after a nasty challenge by Moises Caicedo, which went unpunished to the great bemusement of Jurgen Klopp.
The Liverpool boss spent the last 20 minutes of the first half shaking his head and smiling with pure, unadulterated anger. Few are better in the ‘woe is me’ role than Klopp, but Liverpool stakeholders in general are fully signed up members of the Us Against Them society.
Jamie Carragher said “there’s blocking at every corner, isn’t there?” with the decibels and pitch of the Scouse rising amid his bewilderment at Virgil van Dijk’s goal being ruled out. Entirely missing the point, of course: the problem wasn’t that Wataru Endo blocked Levi Colwill, but that he did so from an offside position.
“Can Klopp’s kids do it?” Carragher asked as more and more of his children came off the bench in the second half, convinced as everyone seemed to be even ahead of the game that the Liverpool injuries had turned them into underdogs despite them being 25 points better off than their opponents in the Premier League, having pulled their pants down less than a month ago.
Chelsea will feel like they should have won the game in normal time, given they had the better of the chances in the second half, with the quality and frequency of those opportunities increasing to a frenzy as 90 minutes approached.
But to suggest that “defeat could be really damaging for Chelsea”, as Carragher put it in extra-time, to a side that included more seasoned winners than academy graduates, was one of many examples on commentary of not just Carragher, but also Gary Neville and Drury, firmly casting Klopp’s Liverpool as the little guy.
“They’ve shrunk right in front of our eyes, ” Neville said of Chelsea after Van Dijk’s late winner, having already delivered a nauseating line worthy of a Drury prep sheet: “It’s Klopp’s kids against the blue billion pound bottlejobs.”
By the end of the game they gave up talking about the football, instead alternating between praising wee Liverpool for fighting the good fight and tearing Chelsea apart. “This game isn’t all about money,” Carragher said with barely contained glee.
An opposite but perhaps more valid narrative might be ’11th-placed Chelsea go toe-to-toe with Premier League title challengers’ but there was none of that, with the co-commentators apparently also of the opinion that Liverpool have a monopoly on being tired.
Liverpool were “understandably leggy” when Chelsea were flying at them at the end of normal time, but as the tide turned it became inexplicable for the Blues to be similarly knackered. “What’s wrong with them?!” Neville crowed.
We’re set for a nauseating enough time in Klopp’s farewell tour without granting Liverpool undue praise for against-the-odds wins which aren’t actually against the odds.
Even with the injuries, Liverpool are a better football team than Chelsea, who – save for maybe four or five decent performances – have been rotten this season. To suggest Pochettino’s side were anything close to favourites going into this game was a madness, and to claim “Chelsea’s chance of winning increase the longer the game goes” was a hollow enough statement before Carragher added in near enough the same breath that the Blues’ substitutes are “woefully inconsistent”.
Liverpool have won a trophy, perhaps the first of four this season, but let’s all try to keep the This Means More-ness of it all at a low simmer, by not creating imaginary walls Klopp and his players need to climb or smash through. Liverpool beat Chelsea, as they should.
