Time to put the Carling Cup out of its misery

We now know the last eight for the Carling Cup and my, how boring a line up is that? The Arsenal v Liverpool match the other night was of a high standard and quite entertaining, but in the end, the result just didn’t matter a jot – as the game unfolded, I found myself adopting the dispassionate bearing of a student of the game rather than somebody caught up in the passion and excitement of it all. I felt like a scout watching new players, prepared to leave ten minutes before the end, Capello style. I didn’t care and frankly, who else would?

It really is high time this competition was put put of its misery – spicing techniques such as the introduction of Scottish clubs have been mooted but I’m now of the opinion that we just don’t need it anymore. This week, a rather histrionic, but nonetheless worrying article in The Times highlighted the new tendency of the competition to attract hooligan elements. Although the totalling of a Barnsley snack bar by errant Man Yoo fans cannot be ignored and much of the ‘evidence’ therein appeared to have been cobbled together hurriedly, it does provide yet another excuse to quietly put the Carling to sleep.

Rob Langham

Rob Langham (pen name: Lanterne Rouge) is co-founder of the defiantly non-partisan football league blog, The Two Unfortunates, a website that occasionally strays into covering issues of wider importance. He's 47 and lives in Oxford while retaining his boyhood support of Reading FC. He tweets as @twounfortunates and has written for a number of websites and publications including The Football Attic, The Inside Left, When Saturday Comes, In Bed with Maradona, Futbolgrad and The Blizzard as well as being nominated for the Football Supporters' Federation Blogger of the Year Award in 2013.