Chelsea match Liverpool but Jürgen Klopp’s side have sense of destiny

Sometimes a miss really is as good as a mile. Wembley was a fevered place at the end of this gruelling, apparently endless FA Cup final. As the Liverpool players capered at the eastern end of the ground, lost in a fog of red smoke, tumbling and rolling on the grass in front of a stand that seemed a single mess of limbs and light and noise, the contrast in the other half of the pitch was unavoidably stark.

Chelsea’s players sat, bereft, on the turf as the end behind them emptied out. And at that moment these two entities seemed to be heading in entirely opposite directions. For Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool this is now a definitive, era-marking season, two domestic cups in the bag and another final to come, the semi-impossible dream of the quad still there.

For 120 minutes Wembley had provided a point of intersection for these two clubs, roped together once again on this stage, chasing the late afternoon sun. But like trains hitting the points and shearing off on their own arc, the sense of separation felt profound at the end.

For Chelsea this was always a chance to say goodbye to something. The Age of Abramovich has been pegged out around these summer beanos, the Metropolitan line north thronged with blue shirts and pink flesh, the sense of a stroll, a spree, a flag day. There will be more of these days, other glories, other eras, other billionaires But nothing quite like that endlessly giving hand. And there would be no Viking funeral here.

Whereas for Liverpool the Klopp supremacy keeps rolling on. This, it turns out, is the sweet spot. How far can it run on from here? There had been a sense that the thing Klopp has built needed a little filing at the edges. Up until the spring of this season a total of two trophies felt a