Dave Tickner: Zlatan inspirational, Kane sensational

The EFL Cup occupies a strange place in English football. I’ve never seen any team, player or manager look anything other than delighted to win it, yet the reaction from fans of other clubs who purport not to care about it (after being eliminated, naturally) is that winning it is not only no big deal but actively embarrassing.

It didn’t take long after Manchester United’s victory in a thrilling Wembley occasion for the usual stuff to start turning up on failed social experiment and notorious online cesspit Twitter. Look at Manchester United, they sneered, look at them celebrating winning a trophy like they’ve won a trophy. 

Some went as far as to suggest that Manchester United winning the first major silverware (sorry, Community Shield) available in the Jose Mourinho era and being pleased about it is evidence of how far the club has fallen.

It’s bizarre and clearly nonsensical, but so is much of tribal English football fandom when you try and apply any kind of logic to it.

But as for the game itself, what an absolute treat. A superb team performance ultimately defeated – just – by a magnificent individual display from one of football’s enduring winners who has comprehensively answered his many critics here.

Comparing Zlatan Ibrahimovic to Eric Cantona is on the one hand trite and facile, yet on the other undeniably compelling. He shares the same force of personality, the will and crucially the talent to drag his team-mates along with him. Without Zlatan, United’s season would have been calamitous. With him, it could yet end with a repeat of Liverpool’s famous ‘tinpot treble’. For everyone not on Twitter, that would surely represent decent success.

It's hard not to feel for Southampton, though. They were excellent. Manolo Gabbiadini has hit the ground sprinting, and contributed far more than his two goals. His hold-up play was first rate, his movement for both his opening goal and the disallowed effort at 0-0 were classic centre-forward play, and his equalising goal was magical.

There’s no escaping the fact that the game could have been entirely different had his neat finish from Cedric Soares’ cross not been wrongly flagged offside. Southampton probably should have won the game anyway, but it’s hard to believe getting an early lead would have been a setback.

However. A couple of points. First, a pox on commentators and supporters alike who opined that he “should have had a hat-trick.” Timelines, people. Timelines. If Gabbiadini’s ‘offside’ goal is given, then the rest of the match plays out differently. 

This may seem trivial, and that’s because it is. But it’s a remarkable blindspot in sports analysis. Golf and cricket too are extremely culpable of ignoring the fact that going back and changing one thing will affect all subsequent things. Honestly, it’s like sports fans have never watched Back to the Future.

Second, while Southampton fans’ dismay at such a crucial decision in one of the club’s biggest games in 40 years is entirely understandable, my response to a high-profile offside error is always the same: it’s amazing there aren’t more.

Again, going back to Twitter, there were countless tweets bemoaning a “shocking decision” after “replays show that…” I’ll stop you there. Linesmen trying to study at least three different moving parts – the ball, the defender, the attacker – at the same time get no replays. They get no freeze frames. They get no handy lines drawn across the pitch. Until the boffins stop dragging their feet and provide us with Robolinesmen then these mistakes will (occasionally) happen.

It’s no consolation for Southampton fans, sure, but the assistants really do have a remarkable strike-rate with the flag given the actual impossibility of performing the job using human eyes. Their inevitable android usurpers will genuinely have their work cut out.

Away from Wembley on Sunday, there was a third hat-trick in nine games for Harry Kane, who is now joint top of the Premier League scoring charts for the season on 17 and set to ease past 20 league goals for the third season in a row.

I remain resolutely convinced that Kane does not actually exist. A clean-cut hero scoring all these goals for his boyhood club? Nah. His name even sounds like it belongs in a comic book. He can’t be real. He’s been willed into being as an antidote to everything that is wrong with modern football, I’m sure of it.

It’s also slightly possible that my problem with Kane is related to the fact I have held a number of embarrassing and incorrect opinions about the Spurs striker over recent years. These include:

1. Harry Kane? Pfft, he’s not as good as Cameron Lancaster.

2. Harry Kane? Pfft, he’ll never be a 20-goal striker.

3. Harry Kane? Pfft, he’s a one-season wonder.

4. Harry Kane? Pfft, what does he offer beside goals?

Sometimes you just have to stop digging.

5. Harry Kane? He is, without caveat, one of the best strikers in the world.