Liverpool win dramatic League Cup final after Tuchel’s Kepa gamble backfires

Kepa Arrizabalaga’s reputation as the penalty shootout specialist may not survive this. Brought on after 119 minutes, he failed to save any of Liverpool’s 11 spot kicks and then ballooned his over the bar. Liverpool’s record ninth League Cup came in remarkable fashion, after a shootout when no one saved a penalty but when Thomas Tuchel’s gamble backfired.

He had removed the man of the match to bring on Arrizabalaga, who infamously refused to be substituted for the shootout in the 2019 final. The Spaniard had been the European Super Cup hero, but this brought an exhibition of superb penalty taking, whether from regulars like James Milner to Liverpool’s reserve goalkeeper Caoimhin Kelleher. And when Arrizabalaga missed, Liverpool won a domestic cup for the first time in a decade.

But it required a marathon. As two Premier League draws between them demonstrated, very little separates evenly-matched teams. Both teams had a goal chalked off; three, in Chelsea’s case. Both were denied by fine goalkeeping. Both had periods where they were on top. It contrived to be hugely eventful and yet goalless. It was an epic in every other respect.

Profligacy was a problem for Chelsea. Kai Havertz kept fashioning opportunities. His team-mates kept missing them. So often the big-game scorer, when Havertz did head in a Timo Werner cross, his supplier was offside. When he arrowed a shot in, he was offside. Yet Havertz’s elusiveness and excellence indicated why the false nine was preferred to Romelu Lukaku.

They encountered resistance in the form of an understudy. Klopp had promised that Kelleher would start, was true to his word and soon had early vindication.

A message showing support for Ukraine ahead of the League Cup final at Wembley