The League Cup Final this weekend

 The League Cup Final this weekend.

This weekend marks the 64th anniversary of the old League Cup and it hardly seems like yesterday since the likes of Rochdale and Norwich City were flavour of the month in football's highest echelons. In the modern incarnation of the Carabao Cup, football now pays homage to Thai energy drinks and corporate greed on quite the most monumental scale of them all. Somehow football has forgotten about its genuine grassroots and those who were overlooked in the relentless pursuit of vast sums of money and even greater quantities of dosh and filthy lucre.

And so we find ourselves casting our minds back to the very inception of the League Cup when an FA old school traditionalist by the name of Alan Hardaker thought it a good idea to create a new competition. This was a time when there were only two TV channels in Britain, a pint of best bitter would probably have set you back a princely sum of a handful of shillings while petrol was so ridiculously cheap that you could probably take a family of four to the seaside without emptying your bank account.

True, Rochdale fitted perfectly the criteria of Hardaker's bold vision, a team languishing in the lowest dungeons of football's dank and dark lower regions. In fact Rochdale were so far removed from the old First Division old boys network that included Liverpool, Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United, Everton and Spurs that they may well have been living in modest and respectable semi detached, terraced houses off the East Lancashire Road compared to the penthouse suites of the top flight.

But the club who play their football at Spotland had somehow reached the miraculous heights of football's upper classes. Of course the League Cup was designed for teams completely outside the highest sphere of top class football. It was felt that football had to remember its poorer cousins, accommodating both its close acquaintances lower down the FA pyramid and hoping a red carpet would be rolled out to the honest toilers and less than star struck colleagues.

Over the weekend Mauricio Pochettino's Chelsea will face Jurgen Klopp's Premier League leaders Liverpool in one of the less prestigious Cup Finals of the season. Now for those of us who believe quite rightly that every football team deserves its day in the sun, Chelsea and Liverpool, although perfectly entitled to be at Wembley for the latest edition of the old League Cup Final, may have to be grateful for their lofty positions. Rochdale and Norwich City were indeed the first trailblazers and nobody should ever forget where they've come from.

It was roughly 20 years after its birth that the League Cup suddenly discovered the considerable financial benefits to be gained from just being the first springtime Cup Final of the season. We knew that there were the incentives and profits to be made and a place in the following season's UEFA Cup was no more than ample reward for their endeavours that season.

And then there was the Milk Cup, football just falling for the easy temptation of becoming grand mercenaries and attaching itself to what used to be one of the most favourite drinks of primary school children during an early morning break. Who could ever have predicted that the Milk Marketing Board would have anything to do with football? At the time of course none of us were really aware of the importance of sports sponsorship in relation to football. But by any other name it was still essentially the League Cup only this time football became helpless victims of circumstances. Or maybe this was just a dramatic sea change in the game's rapidly changing evolution.

Come the 1980s the Littlewoods Cup brought football into the world of iconic commerce, now a sport that had suddenly lent itself to a celebrated pools company. At the time nobody seemed to bat an eye lid since by now football had been well and truly overtaken by million pound retail companies and anybody prepared to throw lavish amounts of money into the game. It almost felt as if football had lost its moral bearings according to some but then there was the realisation that the game had to embrace new technologies and new commercial opportunities to keep up with the rest of other sporting institutions. The Littlewoods Cup was just the launch pad for greater things to happen in the game.

Then in more recent times we were confronted with the Rumbelows Cup which in retrospect almost sounds too antiquated for words. Rumbelows went out of business years ago as an electrical and electronic supplier that produced our radios and TVs in huge quantities. But then most of us would now probably regard as Rumbelows as relevant as gobstoppers in any discussion about football today.

During the early 1970s Spurs dominated the opening years of the League Cup. After two victories in early part of the decade over Norwich and Aston Villa, it was then Manchester City who clinched their first piece of silverware for well over a decade. City overcame Newcastle in the 1974 League Cup Final with that spectacular acrobatic bicycle kick from Dennis Tueart winning the trophy for City. It's hard to believe now of course but City were struggling to impose themselves as a top flight club back then so the irony is not lost on any of us.

In the 1980s Liverpool lifted the League Cup on several occasions while in perhaps the most improbable of all scenarios Swansea walked up the Wembley steps to pick up the now coveted League Cup with a comprehensive 5-0 victory over Bradford City. After West Brom had become the last team to win the old League Cup over two legs against West Ham in 1966 another London side, QPR became the first team to win the trophy a year later at Wembley Stadium when Mark Lazarus and a flamboyant showman named Rodney Marsh guided the Loftus Road club to triumph over West Brom again.

And so to the present day. Still the League Cup or the Carabao Cup continues to be regarded with a certain amount of belly laughter and derision. It still has a certain amount of clout and prestige in the eyes of some but this weekend Liverpool will be aiming to add another trophy to their hugely impressive cabinet while Chelsea will be trying to find some kind of momentum and impetus to an otherwise ropy and disjointed season. These two have already met in an FA Cup Final so they certainly have history but the old League Cup is not something to be dismissed as a poor relation to the FA Cup. It still matters to those who believe it to be a passport into Europe. Rochdale, for their part, will never forget it.