Chapter XXVII. League Cup

Signing Adam was a natural thing to do.

Gao Bo didn't bring Adam to the first team right away, because Adam hadn't been trained in the youth system of the professional league before today, and it would be extremely irresponsible for Adam's development to let him go straight from street football to professional football – for many young people, they must be fully prepared to take on the challenge in the professional league in order to go further in their future professional path.

Adam's sense of the ball, his skills are very good, but he still has a lot to improve, the most important part is the teamwork part, street football is a place to show off skills, but professional football is a temple of pursuit of victory. Adam's current physical condition is also not suitable for the competitive professional scene.

The children in the training camp looked at Adam with envy, of course they knew that this kid was going to develop, he must have entered the eyes of the first-team coach, or it wouldn't be long before his training ground was the training base for the first-team team.

Since Adam lives in East London, dozens of kilometers away, the Luton Club also had to settle the problem of housing for the Adam brothers. Of course, Gao Bo will not ask such a question, he is the head coach of the team, not the family nanny of the youth players.

Gao Bo spent the whole day in the academy, and after a day of training for the academy children, Gao Bo also returned to his residence.

The day's break was quickly over, and when the players were back on the training pitch, it was clear that the first-round win gave them a lot of confidence.

Port Vale is not a strong team, but it can win at home, which shows that the team has been training very solidly for more than two months, and the tactics that the manager insists on and his use of personnel is very effective.

This has strengthened the players' confidence in relegation this season.

However, the next game is not a league game, but a League Cup match.

The English League Cup, also known as the English Football League Cup, is a non-divisional competition between the 92 teams in the English professional league system.

The competition was founded in 1962 by the English Football League (FA) to compete against the FA Cup, which is controlled by the English Football Association, in order to allow clubs to have a knockout based competition outside of the league. However, despite the fact that the League Cup has a long history, it is far less important in the hearts of fans than the FA Cup.

The League Cup is played over seven rounds, with the exception of the semi-finals, which are decided by a single knockout match.

Each team will draw lots to decide the opponent and the home and away team. If the match is tied within 90 minutes, it will be decided after extra time. If the winner is not determined in extra time, the winner will be decided by penalty kicks.

The first round of teams includes all Championship, League One and League Two teams, and the Premier League starts to join in the second round except for the teams participating in European competitions in the third round.

Founded in 1886, the Football League was supposed to control all 92 professional clubs in England at all levels, but in 1992 the 20 teams of the First Division defected to form a parallel Premier League, leaving only 72 clubs under its umbrella. Since the level of the club in charge is not the highest, the weight of speech is naturally not as good as before, and if you want to let the top few clubs in the Premier League participate in the League Cup, you naturally have to look at the faces of others.

The League Cup is already behind the Premier League (League One before '92) and the FA Cup, and for the Premier League's top clubs, the League Cup is just a game to train substitutes. Of course, for these clubs, ignoring the League Cup is also a helpless move, because in addition to participating in the league, FA Cup, League Cup, but also to participate in the lucrative Champions League or Europa League, if the results are very good, a season of 9 months of games can reach nearly 70 games, nearly two games a week, and the players are not iron. As a result, some Premier League giants will send a large number of bench players and even youth teams to participate in the game.

But for Luton, the Carabao Cup is no fuss.

Small and medium-sized clubs can use the League Cup to get the opportunity to play against strong teams, and use the light of strong teams to appear on TV and newspapers, which can not only obtain ticket and TV broadcast revenue, but also expand their influence. Especially if you accidentally break out a big upset, it is a great joy for the fans.

Luton Town were drawn against Nottingham Forest from the Championship in the first round of the Carabao Cup, but they were drawn at home, avoiding the need to travel to the away side.

Nottingham Forest, like Luton Town, were both First Division teams last season, but at the end of the season, the fates of both sides were different.

Nottingham Forest finished runners-up in the First Division and were promoted to the Championship. Luton, on the other hand, were unfortunately relegated and are now struggling to relegate in the second division with 30 points.

Gao Bo is no stranger to the Nottingham Forest team, because this team is already a famous team in England.

Despite the perennial absence of this team in the English top flight, at the end of the seventies, this team once blew a whirlwind in Europe!

In the 1978-1979 and 1979-1980 seasons, Nottingham Forest won the Champions League twice! In terms of the number of Champions League trophies by English teams, Nottingham Forest is second only to Liverpool and Manchester United!

Before drawing this opponent, Gao Bo did not plan to invest too much energy in the League Cup, after all, for Luton, their squad is still a little thin, just to cope with the league is already stretched, if you want to distract from the cup competition, it may have a big drag on the league.

However, the soccer card system suddenly released a mission before this game.

[Mission]: Win the match against Nottingham Forest.

[Quest Reward]: 600 XP points, a yellow card will be randomly drawn!

Yellow cards, huh?

Gao Bo hesitated, if it was a lottery, it would be difficult to draw a color - the probability of drawing a white card was too great.

In the end, Gao Bo decided to use the main lineup in this game. Because at the beginning of the season, the league schedule is not dense, the League Cup is on August 13, and Luton's next league game is on August 18, and there is a gap of five days between the two games, which is enough for the players to rest and recover.

Gao Bo hopes that after winning this game against Nottingham Forest, it would be better to draw a larger Premier League team in the second round, and the attention of the top league teams is very different from that of the lower leagues, and the revenue from the broadcast share alone will be enough to make Luton's finances a little more financially comfortable.

Of course, if the League Cup schedule affects the league in the future, Gao Bo will not hesitate to give up the Cup.

After all, the league is fundamental. Gao Bo doesn't want to stay in the second division for too long, he wants to lead the team to promotion as soon as possible!

However, it is not easy to win a Championship team, especially to win against Nottingham Forest, Nottingham Forest's team is not easy to deal with, just like the city of Nottingham, historically, the city of Nottingham has produced the world's most famous green forest thief Robin Hood, so Nottingham people are full of some "heroic spirit", Nottingham recently won the first place in the "most dangerous city in the UK" selected by the General Association of Insurance Companies of England, and it is also the "center of gravity of gun crime in the UK" according to the statistics of the English police ...

The temperament of the Nottingham Forest team, naturally, is the same as the city, with a rigid temperament, which is not to say that the style of the Nottingham team is dirty, but that this team always has a tenacity, perhaps this is the so-called team heritage - after all, it is also a team that has won the Champions Cup twice.