The Carabao Cup final between Chelsea and Liverpool is coming up on Sunday, and finally we have something for Blues fans to get excited about after almost two full seasons of misery.
We take on a Liverpool team who are plagued by injury, but are also top of the Premier League and looking in menacing form.
Whether you find a Bettors guide in Kenya or go online for your information, they’ll be telling you the same thing: Liverpool are heavy favourites for the game, despite being depleted.
That’s fair enough, if you look at the records.
Things have been locked up tight between the two teams – the two cup finals in 2022 were 0-0 draws decided on penalties. The two league games after that were also scoreless draws.
We then opened our season this year with a 1-1 draw, before the Reds ended the stalemate by smashing us 4-1 at Anfield a month ago.
That result will be what is affected the markets the most. Everyone remembers quite how feeble and lost we looked in that game, and while we expect a better showing at a neutral ground, the gulf in class on display was clearly enough to convince bookies that Jurgen Klopp’s team should be heavily favoured.
For all of this Chelsea team’s talent, they have not delivered consistently this season by anyone’s standards. Good games are often followed with bad ones, and they’ve built up expectations on a few occasions before letting everyone down. We know what they can do, we’re just not sure if they’ll sink or swim at Wembley.
The one thing we have in our favour is the way we’ve performed against big teams. The defeat to Liverpool was bad, but apart from that (including in the opening game of the season) we’ve tended to compete and perform well against sides that actually come out and attack us, leaving our counter attack space to operate in.
The game against Man City last weekend wasn’t electric, but it showed there is a core of players who know how to keep the ball and keep the game tight. From there we can just try to catch Liverpool out as we did City, waiting for the chance to unleash counter attack threats like Raheem Sterling, Nicolas Jackson, Mykhailo Mudryk and so on
What odds on another 0-0? We can see both teams being pretty cautious, with Chelsea lacking confidence and experience, and Liverpool lacking some big leaders.
Once it goes to extra time and penalties, it’s anyone’s game…
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