Carabao Cup Final Preview: Liverpool vs Newcastle
Liverpool will look to bounce back from their Champions League exit by winning a first English trophy for Arne Slot.
This newsletter is normally interested in trying to analyse what has happened rather than trying to predict what might. You have to make an exception for a cup final.
The showdown between Liverpool and Newcastle is fascinating as they’ve somehow managed to largely avoid each other in cups for half a century. When the Reds played Chelsea in their previous three domestic finals, the memory banks overflowed with thoughts of encounters in knockout competitions of the past.
Yet since Bill Shankly directed operations with hand gestures perhaps only he understood on the Wembley bench 51 years ago, the Liverbird and Magpie have only fought four times in knockout football. It is surprising how rarely their paths have crossed, no matter that Newcastle are enduring a trophy drought lengthier than even Everton.
It’s over two decades since the previous cup tie between the clubs. If head-to-head record in one-off occasions ever counts for anything, that won’t be the case here.
A more recent aspect of Liverpool’s record against Newcastle to hearten Kopites is that the Reds are unbeaten in the previous 17 league meetings. It took having Steve McClaren in the dugout for the Magpies to last get one over Liverpool, and who can hope to match up to his managerial nous?
The game in question occurred only seven weeks after Jürgen Klopp’s first match in charge of the Reds, at a time when his new side were still stumbling from high to low on a weekly basis. One assumes the German was impressed by the performance that day of the Magpies’ goal scorer, Gini Wijnaldum.
Despite Liverpool’s recent dominance of the match up, Arne Slot will not take Newcastle lightly. As a man aware of underlying statistics - which he mentioned in reference to PSG recently - he will know that his side’s 3-3 draw in the north-east was a rare match in which they did not ‘win’ the expected goals.
While they were bettered by just 0.2 xG in that game, the Reds of 2024/25 have been an average of 1.3 per match better than their opponents. Outdoing Liverpool by even the barest of all margins is a rarity. We don’t need to look back far for an example of a sizeable statistical victory for Newcastle in this fixture though.