. Every time the manager had seen “light at the end of the tunnel,” he said, it had “usually been an oncoming train.”
It was an appropriate way to describe Liverpool, who did not so much as roll into the Carabao Cup final, their first such showpiece under Arne Slot, as steam their way there. They refused to countenance any other outcome and they utterly flattened Spurs. Who can stop Liverpool this season? It is the question on everybody’s lips as they look down from the summit of the Premier League and eye glory in the Champions League and FA Cup, too.
Nobody really believed that Spurs would do so here, probably not even the diehards who made the trip up north and it was over, really, when Mohamed Salah scored from the penalty spot early in the second half to give them the aggregate lead.
Spurs offered nothing as an attacking force apart from one late shot from the captain, Son Heung-min that crashed against the crossbar. But then it was 3-0, Dominik Szoboszlai having added further to Cody Gakpo’s opener and there would still be time for the imperious Virgil van Dijk to add the fourth. It will be up to Newcastle to deny Liverpool in the final. Slot’s team will start as the heavy favourites.
It had been easy to feel that Liverpool wanted to right a couple of recent wrongs against Spurs from matches in London. There was the Luis Díaz disallowed goal farrago but more pertinently, perhaps, the first-leg of this tie when Spurs midfielder Lucas Bergvall ought to have been sent off rather than allowed to stay on to score the only goal.
The occasion did not need the niggle between Van Dijk and Richarlison at the outset to light any kind of touchpaper but it got it all the same. Richarlison accused Van Dijk of throwing an elbow at him; the Spurs striker tumbling dramatically. “You know,” Richarlison would mouth at him. And when …
Read More
