Should Eddie Howe at Newcastle United take this lead from Jurgen Klopp at Liverpool? | OneFootball

Alan Hansen famously said that you can’t win anything with kids. That was on MOTD in the aftermath of Man Utd’s opening day humiliation at Villa Park in 1995, with a team that included the likes of David Beckham, Nicky Butt, Paul Scholes and Gary Neville.

We all know what happened at the end of the 95/96 campaign and I’m sure Man Utd lifting the Premier League pained us considerably more than it did Hansen, but nevertheless, his oft repeated quote still resonates today.

On Sunday, we saw kids selected by Jurgen Klopp making a massive contribution to Liverpool FC becoming the first team to win the League Cup for the tenth time.

Gary Neville, one of those kids Hansen infamously referred to in the mid-90s and now a co-commentator on Sky Sports, making a pointed reference to the Jurgen Klopp kids getting one over Chelsea’s blue billion pound bottle jobs, after Virgil Van Dijk’s header had won it for the reds in the dying embers of last Sunday’s cup final.

After our 92nd minute transgression at Stamford Bridge in the quarter final, that felt very satisfying, apart from the fact it meant the love in with Jurgen Klopp would ramp up a notch or two.

However, what I wanted to comment on is how Klopp, faced with what some are referring to as an unprecedented injury crisis, had belief in a bunch of teenagers to get Liverpool across the line.

On Sunday, Liverpool’s injury list included the likes of Alisson Becker, Curtis Jones, Darwin Nunez, Diogo Jota, Joel Matip, Stefan Bajcetic, Thiago Alcantara and Trent Alexander Arnold.

Klopp named twenty-year-old Northern Ireland international Conor Bradley in the starting eleven. He also had two nineteen-year-olds, two eighteen-year-olds and a sixteen-year-old on the bench.

As the game ebbed and flowed and with extra time looming, Klopp deployed both nineteen-year-olds (Bobby Clark and James McConnell) and one of the eighteen-year-olds (Jayden Danns). In addition, twenty-one-year-old Jarell Quansah was also sent on. As we know, the kids went on to win the cup.

I’m not wanting to prolong the love in with Jurgen Klopp for one minute, but his faith and belief in the youngsters at Wembley on Sunday, got me thinking about Newcastle United’s unprecedented injury crisis and the contrast between Jurgen Klopp’s courage with an apparent stubbornness on the part of Eddie Howe, something that is perhaps becoming a defining feature of his this season.

Are our youngsters as good as the ones who have emerged from Liverpool’s academy? I don’t know but Howe has certainly shown faith in Lewis Miley, who at seventeen, is younger than any of those who got onto the hallowed turf at the weekend.

Beyond that, the fact that Howe has used twenty-one-year-old Tino Livramento so sparingly (just seven premier league starts) and nineteen-year-old Lewis Hall hardly at all (only one premier league start) is baffling. And whatever happened to Harrison Ashby, twenty-one years of age when he signed for £3 million from West Ham in January 2022, currently on loan at Swansea City?

Against Bournemouth recently, twenty-one-year-old Joe White was introduced on 90 minutes and although he was on the pitch during the time we forced an equaliser, what impact was he really expected to have in such a short amount of time?

At home to Chelsea in November, we saw nineteen-year-old Alex Murphy introduced in the 87th minute, before Michael Ndiweni and Amadou Diallo, twenty and twenty-one years of age respectively, made their Premier League bows in added on time. Watching from up in Level 7, whilst it was great to see these youngsters get on the park, it appeared tokenistic, the team had smashed Chelsea who had been reduced to ten men in the 73rd minute by four goals to one and it struck me that they could have been brought on sooner.

We also have nineteen-year-old Yankuba Minteh on loan at Feyenoord where he seems to have settled in and is making some big game contributions with five goals and two assists so far this season.

I’m not so sure about our other high profile loanee, nineteen-year-old Garang Kuol who we don’t seem to hear much of, although he has started eight times in the Eredivisie for FC Volendam. Will either of these youngsters feature next season? Minteh seems like a good bet but with Eddie, who knows?

I do consider Eddie Howe to be a good coach. He was worked wonders with the squad he inherited and if you believe some of the stuff surrounding Dan Ashworth leaving for pastures new, has heavy involvement in transfers where let’s face it, most of the players we’ve acquired since Eddie arrived have been fantastic additions to the squad, several of them surely worth more now, than what we paid for them.

Eddie will know the strengths and weaknesses of the youngsters at his disposal better than anyone but thus far, it only feels like Lewis Miley is trusted sufficiently to make regular appearances in the first team, although last night at Blackburn we saw how much faith Eddie has in twenty-one-year-old Elliot Anderson, deploying him from the bench with the sole intention of taking one of our penalties. HTL.