Tony Cascarino has once again courted controversy with his frankly ridiculous claim that Jurgen Klopp had “disrespected” the FA Cup by naming a strong side against Aston Villa’s kids, as reported by the Echo.
Following a training ground outbreak of COVID-19, the West Midlands side was faced with a choice between forfeiting the fixture or playing members of their youth squads in the FA Cup third round tie.
“I would have loved if Klopp had gone, ‘you know what, just because we’re Liverpool and we respect what’s happened at Villa Park, we’ll go with U23s too,” Cascarino said. “I didn’t want Liverpool to have Champions League-winning players to go against a Villa team that was more like U18s, actually, than U23s.”
“I wanted that to happen. I get why they didn’t, because it’s a competition Klopp feels they can win so he went strong so he could win the game,” the pundit added. “Listen, I might be wrong on this, because Villa players might have learned a lot from playing against a quality opposition with a lot of top players, and I’m sure they did.”
We’re no stranger to some dodgy remarks made about Liverpool, the players, manager and so on and so forth – particularly not when it comes to the talkSPORT pundit.
While we were admittedly surprised to see Klopp name as strong a first-XI as he did, there was not one errant thought in our minds suggesting that the German had shown disrespect to the cup or his opposition.
The point’s further backed-up by the fact that Mark Delaney, (who filled-in for Dean Smith), noted post-match that the introduction of Thiago Alcantara after the break was a “sign of respect” from the Reds boss.
Ultimately, it’s an experience that Villa’s prospects will benefit from, having put in a performance to draw pride from.