For Chelsea, the club that blew a billion, the Carabao Cup has appreciated to a value beyond its usual worth. A winner’s pot of just £100,000 and a Europa Conference League playoff spot are part of an underwhelming package but even Chelsea’s current ownership must recognise there is more to football than mere money.
Beating Newcastle in the quarter‑final had been celebrated in a fashion rarely viewed in Chelsea’s post-Abramovich times. Perhaps something could be rescued from a second successive wreck of a season, though for that to happen, another second-leg rescue mission at Stamford Bridge is now required.
After the Riverside, Middlesbrough’s hopes of returning to the final of the competition they won in 2004 cannot be dismissed. Neither can the fecklessness of the current Chelsea. A club where trophies once arrived as a matter of course have entered the type of drought and self-doubt for which their fans previously mocked rivals.
Nine years ago, when at Tottenham, reaching the League Cup final – and losing against Chelsea – helped to gain Mauricio Pochettino admirers among initially questioning supporters. The Pochettino of old, the chest-beating mystic of White Hart Lane, is yet to show himself at Chelsea. At the Riverside, arms crossed, he was as unimpressed as the away fans who barracked his players at full-time.
Perhaps experience smooths the edges, the ageing process lowers the testosterone output. This is probably a harder job, too, given the incoherence of Chelsea, where recruitment fulfils accounting principles before team-building. Who to answer to? Beyond the Spurs fans, there used only to be Daniel Levy, not a room full of sporting directors and venture capitalists, each throwing around their own bright blue‑sky thinking.
In placing trust in Cole Palmer there is something of the patronage that helped to convert Harry Kane into a modern great. Such has been Palmer’s reliability that it came as a shock when he fired wide after Jonny Howson’s first-half error, even more so after Tom Glover’s goalkeeping mistake before half‑time. There was something of Kane’s doggedness in Palmer’s refusal to hide thereafter but this is a player in his first full season as a first-team pro. He is permitted a dip when others have never risen to any sort of prominence.
Unproven players on long contracts are what Pochettino must work with. Beyond Palmer, Thiago Silva and Raheem Sterling, Pochettino struggles for the lieutenants to whom he has always turned. Injuries have been unhelpful, Christopher Nkunku, missing again, offered more in 152 minutes than most of his attacking colleagues have done all season. Reece James’s repeated issues are troubling. What might Carney Chukwuemeka have offered? But even among a fully fit squad, there would be no Adam Lallana, who hit his peak at Southampton, for example. Chelsea have no such tier of talent. Conor Gallagher could be a floppy-haired Dennis Wise type, if only club suits would stop looking at his book value.
On Teesside, that incoherence was evidenced in both attack and defence. In the absence of a striker, before Armando Broja’s second-half arrival, Palmer was playing false No 9, while Silva, at 39, five years older than France’s new PM, increasingly looks an ageing man amongst boys.
Levi Colwill, yet to match the standards of his Brighton loan period, was achingly guilty in the buildup to Hayden Hackney’s goal, Isaiah Jones twisting him in knots. The names of Malo Gusto and Axel Disasi engage little beyond bemusement, and as for the midfield cover provided in Hackney’s goal by Moisés Caicedo and Enzo Fernández: can £200m-plus really only buy such positional callowness? How vulnerable to counterattacks were a Chelsea team that play against such tactics in the Premier League each and every week?
Boro are a reminder no club should expect to stay around forever. Nothing is confirmed. They owed Chelsea one. More than one. Chelsea had won the teams’ past nine meetings, including the May 2017 defeat at Stamford Bridge that relegated Boro when the team coach, stuck in Kings Road traffic, was late for its own funeral party. This competition, too, reminded of a different era, the 1990s when both clubs were pioneers in shipping in foreign talent but Chelsea won the 1998 League Cup to follow beating Boro in the 1997 FA Cup final.
This was a meeting on a far more uneven levels. Michael Carrick was left without 13 first-team players once Emmanuel Latte Lath had limped off. The loss of Alex Bangura to a hamstring problem made it 14. Give or take Steven Gerrard’s Saudi adventures at Al-Ettifaq, the former anchor midfielder is the remaining member of England’s 2006 World Cup squad, the one‑time golden generation, to be in frontline football management. Unlike a Gerrard, Lampard or a Rooney, he is no celebrity appointment and despite his team’s setbacks this season there is faith in his coaching abilities. The chairman, Steve Gibson, who has underpinned the club’s various rises and falls since 1986, knows a talented coach when sees one.
Carrick’s team responded admirably, wonderfully to their early setbacks. Pochettino would recognise it is easier to know the qualities of each player when there aren’t so many of them. Teams can only play above themselves once they have been built with football in mind.
