We can surely all agree that football simply does not get bigger than Carabao Cup quarter-final week. Just one of the great midweeks of the year, a chance to squeeze in yet another fixture just before Christmas and test the hamstrings of anyone yet to suffer that familiar winter twang.
There are eight teams still standing, in accordance with quarter-final traditions, and it would be fair to say that for many reasons old and new the dear old Carabao occupies contrasting positions of significance and importance for the eight managers involved. So let’s rank them, shall we? Everyone loves it when things are ranked.
It would be quite the story, but a lot has had to go right and also really very wrong indeed for Rusk to even still be in charge at Southampton when the Carabao final rolls around in March.
Looks certain at the very least to have the chance to steer Southampton into the last four this week, though. A permanent replacement for Russell Martin doesn’t appear all that imminent, so it falls to Rusk to tick the boxes and complete the formalities of getting past Liverpool in the last eight.
The most obvious Bigger Fish To Fry situation among the eight remaining managers, with Liverpool cruising in the now hibernating Champions League but more importantly now in the process of seeing their lead atop the Premier League trimmed by Chelsea’s relentless form and their own new-found tendency to draw games or even more carelessly have them postponed.
Should make it into the last four without trying too hard given the identity of their last-eight opponents, but almost certain in that case to come up against more Carabao-invested opposition in the semis.
We would suggest the Carabao is slightly more of a priority for Slot specifically than Liverpool more generally. But only slightly. It’s definitely a bonus to be able to get that first trophy under the belt, and Jose Mourinho used to speak with great fondness – back when such emotions were still available to him – about the League Cup as a launch-pad for further, greater success. It would be a lovely little bonus, but harsh as it is, if Slot’s season were now to end with a Carabao and nothing more it would be distinctly underwhelming.
As for Liverpool, they’ve won two of the last three. Nobody needs that much Carabao.
Tricky for Ruben is the Carabao. On the one hand, it’s very clear from his shifting team selections and use of absolutely every single substitution available to him that he is desperately using every available match to glean as much information as he possibly can about the squad he’s inherited.
But it’s equally clear that he’d very much like some time and space to be able to do some proper training-ground work to impart his vision and methods to a squad still understandably struggling to adapt to what is a very different way of doing things.
Spurs up next for Amorim so literally anything could happen there, but if he emerges from that trip to north London with a semi-final place you’d imagine he’d give it plenty when the time comes. After all, Erik Ten Hag won this thing in his first season and that worked out absolutely brilliantly.
Probably more interested now than he was a few weeks ago when Palace were still straining desperately to ease clear of a relegation fight in which they should really be nothing more than half-interested spectators.
When the quarter-final draw was made it would have been hard to make a case for Palace going to Arsenal and getting anything more out of it than the relief of a game that didn’t have potentially dread-filled real-world consequences for their Premier League status.
No longer quite true, that. Arsenal are more vulnerable, and Palace less wretched. It does appear quite clearly now that there are – as we all very strongly suspected – at least three teams much worse than this Palace side and their very decent manager.
Arsenal in a Carabao quarter-final now feels like a much more appealing genuine free hit with actual chance of progression.
It’s not going to usurp the 2022 Europa League success with Eintracht Frankfurt atop his CV, but it would be a welcome second major title for a manager whose ability doesn’t really tally with a relatively blank honours section.
Frank has absolutely nothing left to prove at Brentford given where he’s taken them from and to, but the slightly negative corollary is what does he really have left to achieve? There is a ceiling for clubs like his that is almost impossible to break through, and even the League Cup isn’t the potential source of glory for smaller but well-established Premier League sides it once was.
As squad depth across the Big Six – and really specifically here United, City, Liverpool and Chelsea – has grown it has become so much harder for teams like Brentford now to do what your Leicesters and Birminghams, your Middlesbroughs and Swanseas, the Blackburns of this world once did.
The last 11 League Cups have been hoarded by Liverpool, United, City and Chelsea and there is no longer the expectation there once was that a club like Brentford might be able to snaffle one.
It nevertheless still represents the least unlikely way for Frank to do something truly new to put a cherry on top of all he’s achieved here.
And then you get a shot at the Conference League.
Would address a couple of quirks, at least. First, that for all Arsenal’s dramatic improvement under Arteta the only actual silverware to show for it remains the FA Cup win from his first Covid-interrupted season, a season in which Arsenal were for the most part really quite rubbish in all the other competitions.
The second is Arsenal’s own p*ss-poor record in this competition. Sure, it’s never been the absolute tip-top number-one priority but they haven’t won the thing since the Domestic Cup Double of 1993 and that was only their second win.
Even perennial trophy-dodgers Spurs have won it twice since Arsenal last managed, while all told the other five Big Sixers have won 23 Carabaos and Coca-Colas and Worthingtons and Capital Ones and Carlings since Arsenal got their hands on one. That seems quite silly.
One of two managers in this list who a) could really do with a trophy this season and also very importantly b) could definitely point to even this most tinpot of all the majors as a significant breakthrough moment for him and his club and then also c) should welcome anything that does anything to ease the pressure on their job and silences the whispers for any length of time.
Howe himself – for understandable enough reasons – still has no top-tier team trophy to sit alongside an undeniably impressive collection of individual manager of the month and year gongs.
Newcastle’s own silverware drought, meanwhile, is one that would make Tottenham blush having failed to add a single proper bauble to the St James’ Park trophy cabinet since the 1950s. We’re really sorry, lads, but the Intertoto Cup absolutely does not count.
A certified genuine Carabao, though? Now you’re talking.
Set his stall out very early this season with his infamous ‘I always win something in year two’ claim. While historically undeniably accurate, it was nevertheless a wild move to leave oneself quite such a hostage to fortune when said fortunes are those of Tottenham Hotspur, the final-level boss of banter clubs.
It does, though, also feel like Postecoglou’s Spurs absolutely could do it. Unlike previous iterations of Spurs that possessed the wherewithal to potentially challenge for a cup, Postecoglou has masterminded a situation where their league form is so absurdly inconsistent that it is no longer a viable route to anything. He’s playing 4D chess, mate. How to stop this club being obsessed with finishing fourth? Somehow be 10th with a goal difference of +17. He’s a genius, a visionary.
There are thus multiple reasons for Postecoglou and Spurs to absolutely throw everything at the cups this season. They are in many ways a glorious and high-gloss version of the classic Spurs sides of old; a threat to absolutely anybody in a one-off game but a threat to absolutely nobody across 38 or 42.
Three eminently plausible routes to trophy success exist for Postecoglou and his band of merry man (and Timo Werner) with a home quarter-final here against a plausibly less interested Manchester United, a kind third-round FA Cup draw and the weakest-looking Europa League in years.
For the rest of us it now only remains to sit back and discover precisely how and when they go about f*cking each one of those opportunities directly into the sun.