Manager offers contrast to many coaches who set their academy graduates up to fail with cheap, low-intensity minutes
Nobody looks overawed. Nobody looks out of place. Nobody looks as if they have school in the morning or are wearing a shirt two sizes too big for them. Conor Bradley walks over towards the Liverpool fans, arms aloft, Virgil van Dijk and Cody Gakpo either side of him, and this doesn’t feel like a dream or a Photoshop job or an artfully shot credit-card advert. James McConnell gets his turn with the trophy, and it doesn’t feel awkward or hefty in his hands. This is Liverpool, this is Wembley, and once you slip on the red shirt – no matter how high the number on the back of it – you know exactly what is expected of you, and what to expect in return.
And so even amid their injuries, their relative inexperience, the pummelling of Caoimhín Kelleher’s goal, it felt like the most natural thing in the world that Liverpool should win this final. Chelsea had the better of the chances and the more expensively assembled side, and yet did we ever really doubt the team built from candy floss, Melwood undergraduates and veterans of the Papa John’s Trophy? Perhaps, as Jürgen Klopp begins the long turn for home, this is the real measure of his work: a machine where winning is so ingrained that the parts themselves are largely interchangeable, even when the parts replacing them were recently children.