Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool are a great team with a need for more trophies

And you shall know us by the trail of sponsors. The League Cup has always been a bird-on-a-wire kind of thing. Every year this fond old springtime ritual is menaced and marginalised and threatened with ever more imminent extinction, but still people keep turning up in February and March asking where the party is.

The title branding tells a story of that picaresque progress. In the space of 40 years, English football’s second-string domestic cup has gone from the quiet gravitas of being named after the entire Football League, through Coca-Cola, beer, electrical goods and the generic liquid “milk” into a holding pattern of insurance and financial products and now on to its current iteration as the global face of Thailand’s second-most popular energy drink.

And still it marches on, enduringly popular with the people who actually go to watch and a genuinely mouthwatering prospect as Chelsea and Liverpool prepare to meet at Wembley on Sunday afternoon. This time around the headline branding looks spot-on. A perfect fit for a fizzy, colourful, fun kind of day, a little left-field but with its own peppy sense of fun; not to mention, on this occasion, a little caffeinated ignition. Not least for Jürgen Klopp’s Liverpool, a great club team still in the process of writing their own story as a great club team, who really could do with winning this one.

Liverpool won this competition four years in a row from 1981 to 1984 and, filtered though those grainy, glorious tight-shorted years of triumph, it feels like the touchtone for any great Liverpool winning era.

Is this one yet? It is a deliberately provocative question. But there is a kind of disjunction here. Klopp has created a thrillingly well-grooved elite team. But the hard fact