Tinpot Trophy Truth | OneFootball

What a few weeks it has been, securing that elusive Liverpool victory in the best possible way, at Wembley in the Carabao Cup Final.

Eddie Howe hadn’t managed to beat The Reds as Newcastle gaffer. Despite regularly dispatching many of the other top Premier League teams, Liverpool was that one nut he couldn’t crack.

Having beaten the other members of the top four in the Premier League table en route to the Carabao Cup final, Howe’s mighty Mags faced the champions elect.

Liverpool were the holders, the team that has won the trophy more than any other.

Not only did we win. We won in style.

Any victory would have done. A backs to the wall, nerve shredding, smash and grab would have been fine and dandy. The celebrations would hardly have been subdued as a result. But what a way to do it. To completely outplay the best team in the league and come away as worthy winners.

Last weekend we had the victory parade and town moor celebrations. Whatever anyone was expecting, we might just have topped it.

The turnout was astonishing. Was there a single person left at home? I opted for the Town Moor celebrations and looked on with a touch of envy as the big screens showed the progression of the bus.

Fans packed every street, stood on bus shelters, clung from lampposts and trees. The players will never witness anything like it again. Even those with winner’s medals secured elsewhere, must have been awestruck by the spectacle of a Geordie joy fest.

Social media is absolutely littered with images and videos of the day. I haven’t been able to get enough of the content. It certainly hasn’t got old for me yet.

Of course, with social media comes the negativity. Although a good three quarters of non-Newcastle fans appear to be supportive and congratulatory, we have come in for plenty of mocking too.

The main thing getting thrown at us is that we’re going over the top about a Tinpot/Mickey Mouse trophy. A lot of those detractors saying that we said the same about the competition when Sunderland got to the final in 2014 and when Middlesborough won it a decade prior to that.

I don’t know whether that was widely stated. I didn’t live in the area on either of those occasions and was young for both, so wasn’t as active online.

Obviously, we shouldn’t care what other fanbases say and I’m sure most don’t. If you do feel the need to defend anything you may or may not have said previously, then take a dive into the facts.

The truth is, in the past the League Cup has historically been seen as a bit of a joke trophy. For a long period through the nineties and up to a period I’ll cover shortly, top teams used the tournament as an opportunity to field largely squad and academy players. If they got to the final, great. If they didn’t, they weren’t fussed. They had bigger fish to fry.

This still happens now, even we do it. However, most teams have much stronger squads than they did ten, fifteen years ago and when they get to the quarter finals, I’d say teams become very serious about the competition. Did Tottenham or Arsenal rest players in the semi finals this year? Absolutely not.

When Middlesborough won, they did it against Bolton Wanderers. The year before had seen Liverpool take on Man Utd in what was a glamorous final for the times. However, in two of the three finals prior, two of the finalists weren’t even in the Premier League. I have bracketed where each finalist finished in the league at the end of the relevant campaign.

In 2002 it was an all Premier League final with Blackburn Rovers (10th) beating Tottenham (9th), in 2001 Liverpool (4th) beat Birmingham (5th in Championship) and in 2000 Leicester (8th) bettered Tranmere (13th in Championship). Only one top four club made it to the final in three years.

The tournament appeared to get a bit more fashionable in the mid noughties with Chelsea and Man Utd sharing five of the following six trophies, Tottenham the anomaly in that run.

But as we approached Sunderland’s unsuccessful attempt to end their own long trophyless spell, we saw the bigger teams appearing not to bother as much again. In 2011 Birmingham (18th and relegated) beat Arsenal (4th). In 2012 it was a far from vintage Liverpool (8th) scraping past Cardiff on penalties (6th in Championship) before Swansea (9th) managed to beat Bradford City (7th in League Two!!!). That’s right, in three cup campaigns before Sunderland took on Man City, only one team that finished in the top four, made it to the final again. Again, a Championship side and this time even a League Two outfit made it all the way to Wembley. Chances are, we did consider the trophy a bit Micky Mouse. That’s not to say it wasn’t still an achievement to get there and no doubt we would have still loved to win it. Nonetheless, it is difficult to argue that the competition is far more challenging to win these days.

Before our triumph, the eleven finals starting with Sunderland’s one, were all won by either Man City, Man Utd, Chelsea or Liverpool. Every one of those finals was won by a team who would qualify for the Champions League in the same season (a nice bit of foreboding for us perhaps), Man Utd the only team not to finish in the top four but still qualified by winning the Europa League in 2017.

Five of the previous winners also won the Premier League the same season and one runner up was a Premier League winner, meaning the league champions featured in more than half of the finals over that period. Four of the runners up across the eleven years were teams that also finished in the top four.

In the 30 years prior to 2014 only two Premier League/First Division winners had also picked up this cup. Man United in 2009 and Chelsea in 2005. You have to go right back to Liverpool in 1984 for the most recent example of this happening before 2005.

Man City won this competition four years in a row between 2018 and 2021 before Liverpool won two out of the next three. Hardly a case of the top teams hitting the eject button at the earliest opportunity anymore.

Every trophy matters these days and this one meant the world to us.

The fans chucking mocking or negative comments our way are jealous that a) their team didn’t win the trophy but more emphatically b) that their fanbase could never have put on the show that we did on Saturday night.