• ‘If we want top five, we need Cole,’ says Chelsea manager
• Liverpool’s Arne Slot on defeat: ‘The margins are small’

“The kind of player who can do things that no one expects,” Enzo Maresca said of Cole Palmer after this game. Still, pretty much the last thing anyone expected Palmer to do in mid-January was to go 18 games without a goal in all competitions.

Now, with the drought finally at an end courtesy of a late penalty against Liverpool in a 3-1 win for Chelsea, Maresca said that Palmer was “not happy” with his lack of goals in the last few months, and backed him to help the side “reach something important” in the crucial last few games of their season.

There used to be a rivalry here, once. Two decades ago this was genuinely the most foreboding fixture in English football; a decade ago it was still deciding the destiny of league titles; five years ago it was still appointment viewing. Here, amid a fiesta of missed chances and offside flags, a deeply unserious Chelsea beat a Liverpool team that clearly couldn’t care less.

The score could have been 5-0 or 5-5 or 0-0 and frankly nobody would have been any the wiser. There was a guard of honour at the start. There were triumphal odes from the away end. Chelsea fans retorted with the Steven Gerrard song, and the “you’ll never get a job” song, and the “always the victims” song. What was it people were saying about football becoming ever more predictable, ever more rote, ever more uninspiring?