Newcastle are back in the winner’s enclosure to end a frankly absurd trophy drought, while Liverpool simply never turned up until it was all too late in what is likely to be one of the more memorable Carabao Cup finals.
1. This Means More. We’ve heard it plenty of times about Liverpool and never really understood what it meant. But today there could be no doubt that this meant more. Just not to Liverpool. Liverpool wanted to win the Carabao Cup, but Newcastle needed to win it.
Seventy years is a ridiculous and hilarious length of time for a club of this size to go without a proper domestic trophy and that is the type of history to weigh heavy on occasions like this.
Two years ago, Newcastle reached the final of this competition and again found themselves up against a serial trophy winner in Manchester United, a club for whom one League Cup success could never mean as much as it would to Newcastle.
And Newcastle just didn’t turn up. They didn’t do themselves justice. They were easily beaten by an ordinary side.
But they learned from that experience. Eddie Howe talked about trying to take the emotion out of the equation this time around. We’re still not really sure how possible or desirable that actually is, but from first minute to last here Newcastle were clear in their plan and unstinting in their approach.
They were better in every single way and by a considerable distance than a Liverpool team cruising to the Premier League title. This was an awesome team performance.
2. There were heroes in black and white wherever you looked on the pitch. Some of those players quite rightly got almost as much screen time at Wembley as Ant and Dec.
From Dan Burn’s towering headers, to Alexander Isak’s high-class line-leading and expertly taken second goal, to Bruno Guimaraes’ scheming and Kieran Trippier’s experience and above all else Joelinton’s, well, everything, Newcastle made damn sure that even if the day were to end in disappointment – as it still could have, had a weary Liverpool themselves turned up with anything like the performance of which they are so obviously capable – there would be no repeat of the horrible, empty ‘if only’ feelings from two years ago.
The players rightly take the lion’s share of the credit here because they really were magnificent. But what a day, too, for Eddie Howe. The first English manager of an English club to win a major trophy since 2008 and his gameplan on the day was both flawlessly conceived and flawlessly delivered.
3. You could make a compelling man-of-the-match case for half-a-dozen Newcastle players, but for us it would be hard to look past Joelinton and a powerhouse, match-shaping midfield performance. He was everything, everywhere all at once for Newcastle, one moment driving them forward yet again, the next flying into a last-ditch block and celebrating with the enthusiasm of a goalscorer.
It’s not exactly news that the one-time failing striker has transformed into a complete midfielder these days, but here was the defining performance on a huge stage that cements a place for the Brazilian in the Newcastle pantheon.
4. Newcastle began as they intended to go on. From the first whistle they were into Liverpool, never allowing the Reds to settle into the game. For all Howe’s talk of taking emotion out of the occasion, this always felt like Newcastle’s likeliest route to success here. Exploit the atmosphere their own fans would create while putting pressure on any cracks there might be in Liverpool from the physical and mental exertions of their midweek Champions League disappointment against PSG.
5. Just how heavily that defeat laid on Liverpool who can say, but whatever the reason or reasons they were a million miles off it here, with their biggest players going missing on the big occasion.
Mohamed Salah was every bit as much a spectator as Ant and Dec and on screen slightly less, while Virgil van Dijk’s horror afternoon was summed up by the way Alexander Isak toyed with and mocked him before, during and after he scored the decisive and timely second goal early in the second period.
6. This was another sorry entry in the list of major final performances from Salah. His quality is beyond question, but that only makes that record – one goal, and that from an iffy penalty, in eight major finals for Liverpool and Egypt – even more striking.
Rarely can he have been quite this anonymous, though. And while huge credit for that must go to Newcastle for the way they simply never allowed Liverpool’s football to thrive, this was a cup final. This is the time you’re asking your biggest players to find a way even when it’s difficult to do so. Especially when it’s difficult to do so. Salah was simply not up to that task here.
7. As a crystal-clear example of how one team had obvious plans for the day that they knew inside out and the other felt like it was just kind of winging a game of lesser importance, it would be hard to top the opening goal.
Newcastle’s plan to utilise Dan Burn’s height not by putting him in direct duels with Van Dijk or Ibrahima Konate but by deploying him elsewhere to create mismatches against your Alexis Mac Allisters and your Diogo Jotas was a fine one, but not particularly subtle. That Liverpool seemingly spent the entire first half either not realising or not thinking it important was staggering.
His general approach until the corner right on half-time had been to try and divert the ball back from beyond the back post into dangerous positions from which mischief might be made by others amid the chaos.
But if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing yourself, and for his final act of the half he decided instead to power a header from miles out into the bottom corner with absurd force. It’s rare for a header from beyond the penalty spot to raise not one question about the goalkeeping, but this one was all about the header itself and Liverpool’s abject failure to recognise the looming threat and/or even attempt to counter it.
8. In the few seconds between Newcastle’s goal and the half-time whistle, Liverpool got Salah on the ball in space in a dangerous position for just about the first and ultimately last time in the entire afternoon. He duly created Liverpool’s only real chance of the half, which was badly shanked by Jota.
Up until that point the shots tally for the half had read eight from Newcastle, with three on target, and none whatsoever from Liverpool.
That late moment highlighted a few things. The unlikely extent of the dominance Newcastle were enjoying, the danger even such an unusually passive Salah still possesses, and Jota’s great fortune in being far more likely to go unnoticed than, say, a Darwin Nunez.
Jota has been really quite strikingly poor since returning from injury but has almost entirely escaped the meme-based evisceration that is his more high-profile under-performing team-mate’s lot.
9. That one shanked effort late on apart, all Liverpool had to show for the first half was one unconvincing penalty appeal for a Kieran Trippier handball. It was the sort of penalty we see given all the time in European competition but almost never in English football.
There are not many areas in which we consider ourselves much of a little Englander, but there are two things we do better than Europe and for which we will never be convinced otherwise. One is the inherent superiority of our magnificent three-pin plug, the other is our very correct belief that this sort of ‘handball’ in no way merits a punishment as severe as a penalty kick. It’s not all bad here.
10. We expected a response in the second half. But really there was little change. Liverpool made some effort to be more proactive and direct, with one early attempt to play out from the back having Gary Neville purring and offering some hint that the second half might be different to the first.
But no. More chaos from a Newcastle corner ended with Isak putting the ball in the net only to be denied by an offside decision against Bruno Guimaraes for being in Caoimhin Kelleher’s eyeline. It was probably fair enough but with huge potential to become A Talking Point if such a thing became needed.
It was not. Barely a minute later, Isak had the ball in the net again having made the difficult task of sweeping home a bouncing ball look absurdly easy and left van Dijk wondering just what had happened.
11. Liverpool’s response to that second goal was telling. Because Liverpool’s response to that goal was something akin to complete panic. There were still 35 minutes remaining. Still plenty of time, in other words, for a team that has been as good as Liverpool this season to justifiably think they could still play their way back into the game and back their greater overall quality to tell.
That… was not the route Liverpool and Arne Slot chose. He chose, with over half an hour to play, a desperate Hail Mary. Off came Konate and Jota, on came Curtis Jones and Darwin Nunez.
Ryan Gravenberch dropped back into defence, and what little cohesive shape or structure Liverpool had was lost entirely. The game became easier, rather than harder, for Newcastle to manage, with the real surprise their failure to fully kill the game off with a third goal against what was now a listing shambles of a Liverpool defence.
It was enough to make you wonder a) what this season might have looked like had any team managed to put Liverpool under real pressure in the title race, and b) what next season might look like for Slot and co.
We’re not saying that this one game – or the PSG game – undoes the obvious dominant excellence of Liverpool’s league form. But there are now doubts where they didn’t exist before about Liverpool’s ability to do it all again next year. And that’s even without knowing what happens next for the Contract Three.
With Trent Alexander-Arnold injured and both Van Dijk and Salah miserably poor on the day, it was an uncomfortable look at a worrying near future for a club that does, admittedly, have a Premier League title party to enjoy before they need to worry themselves too hard about all that.
12. And yet even with that said, having criticised the speed and extent of Liverpool’s panic after that second goal, it still almost worked, with Curtis Jones forcing Nick Pope into his first meaningful contribution of the final moments later.
It was a save that looked better in real time than subsequent replays suggested it was. The ball was quite close to him in the end, and it would have gone down as an error had he let it in. But it still felt like a vital moment in the game. A goal so swift and undeserved for Liverpool to bring the deficit down to one would have shifted the entire feel of the game and occasion.
13. When Liverpool did finally get back into it, we were already deep into a lengthy period of injury time and then for reasons unknown required a full two-and-a-half minutes to confirm what was obvious from the very first replay of Federico Chiesa’s initially disallowed goal: that he was in fact not remotely offside.
Sure, a two-and-a-half-minute check is preferable to Well Done, Boys, Good Process. But it still leaves you with less rather than more confidence in a system where those using it now clearly live in dread fear of mistakes, scared of their own shadows and chasing their own tails.
And that’s even before we got round to a shaking John Brooks wholly unconvincingly taking on the Yank-brained task of announcing the changed decision to the stadium. Adorable as it was to see Chiesa emerge as the very last person in the entire stadium to realise he’d scored, we’re pretty confident that Brooks will not be following Mark Clattenburg to Gladiators when he hangs up his Premier League whistle.
14. The goal and its lengthy delay meant that by the time play restarted a win that Peter Drury had long since awarded to Newcastle with lengthy, baffling nonsensical soliloquys about black-and-white and Jackie Milburn and one-club cities was suddenly once again against the odds and against the run of play back alive.
There was still five minutes left for Liverpool to find an equaliser against a club whose fans simply wouldn’t be human if they weren’t now fearing the absolute worst about just what it would feel like were a 70-year drought to be extended further despite going into injury-time of a final with a two-goal lead. As our hero Drury observed. “It’s all about time now. Time and Tyne.” Strong words. Strong, bewildering words.
In any final the way Newcastle’s players managed those final few minutes would have been impressive. In the wider context of Newcastle taking on not just Liverpool here but also the sheer, albatross-like weight of their own history, it was even more remarkable.
The vast majority of those closing moments were played out near the corner flags at the Liverpool end, with the Premier League champions-elect simply unable to extract themselves from the vice-like grip being placed upon them by Callum Wilson.
Wilson has been around the game for an awfully long time and scored an awful lot of goals, but we’d wager he’ll look back on the final few minutes of this game as among the finest of his career. And you know what? He’d be absolutely one million per cent right to do so.
15. There is an elephant in the room, though. No matter how hard everyone tried to avoid it. Now we don’t personally share the near-unanimously held view within English football that Newcastle fans are deserving or special above and beyond any other fanbase. But we can understand that view and why it’s held. That really has been an absurdly long trophy drought after all.
Yet even if you hold that view and are particularly and especially delighted for that fanbase you must also accept that while this is a victory for them it is also a victory for the abysmal regime that now launders its reputation through Newcastle United and to which the vast majority of that fanbase has surrendered entirely.
It’s not that this was a victory that everyone spent the entire afternoon telling us is a joyous and good and wonderful one it’s that to even mention any possible alternative to that narrative was to see you instantly decried for spoiling the fun or to become buried under ever more extreme and ludicrous whataboutery.
We haven’t always seen eye-to-eye with Ollie Holt here over the years, but to his credit he did address this on Twitter/X/whatever. And the replies are overwhelmingly depressing.
There’s one caveat, obviously: this was also a triumph for the barbaric, repressive state of Saudi Arabia that owns Newcastle. It’s impossible not to be pleased for the fans but also impossible to forget what the club’s owners stand for and what that says about the Premier League
— Oliver Holt (@OllieHolt22) March 16, 2025
If you ever wonder why sportswashing exists, it is as simple as this. It really, really works really, really well. The sight of Yasir Al-Rumayyan at the trophy lift should make anyone queasy. It is not denigrating nor belittling Newcastle’s achievement or what it means to anyone to acknowledge this discomfort exists.
16. At least Jason Tindall got himself up there for the trophy-lift before most of the players, though. Good to see the world hasn’t yet entirely spun off its axis.
