Barely into the second year of his second spell at the club he graced as a player and then manager, Kenny Dalglish has steered Liverpool to their first trophy in six years.
The League Cup was the side’s first piece of silverware since their 2006 FA Cup victory over West Ham.
And with the team also in the FA Cup quarter-finals and a contender for a top-four berth in the Premier League to ensure automatic qualification into the Champions League, Dalglish hopes it’s only the start of something special.
“Although we have won something today, that is not us finished,” Dalglish said.
“We don’t want to stop here, we want to keep going. It (Liverpool) means an awful lot to a lot of people.
“All we do is try to make them as happy as we possibly can. Today we have been able to do that. Hopefully it makes up for some of the days when we have not been able to.”
The 60-year-old Dalglish, who is widely considered the greatest player to don Liverpool’s red shirt, took the helm in January 2011 after Roy Hodgson’s brief reign. By then, Liverpool had already gone five years without a trophy.
Before Dalglish quit as Liverpool manager in 1991 after his first stint, Liverpool bestrode English football in much the same way that Manchester United has in the past couple of decades.
After an illustrious career as a player in which he won six league championships and three European Cups, Dalglish’s six-year tenure as manager yielded three more league titles and two FA Cups.
Since then, the team has been in decline, the spectacular come-from-behind victory over AC Milan in the 2005 Champions League final notwithstanding.
The task of returning Liverpool to somewhere near their former heights is not going to be easy, and Dalglish is reluctant to promise a return to the glory days.
But he hopes the victory will act as the launch-pad for more success.
“If you do something you enjoy, you’re going to want more of it,” he said.
“I think that’s logical, it’s not to say it’s going to happen.”