Rodgers’ Toddlers ready to jump in at deep end

We’ve had the Busby Babes, Coad’s Colts and Fergie’s Fledglings so is it time now to start talking of Rodgers’ Toddlers?

Well, perhaps we should be wary, and not only because it’s always too easy to be blinded by the hype when another episode of Star Trek — The Next Generation makes it to the big screen. In any event, while Brendan Rodgers might have been the manager who chose the names for the team sheets for the games against Young Boys Bern in the Europa League and then, this week, against West Brom in the League Cup, the real credit for the rise of the kids at Liverpool probably belongs to Rafa Benitez, whose appointment in 2009 of Frank McParland as director of player development and academy manager, helped set in train in the process which now has more excitable sorts talking of the emergence of a new golden generation on Merseyside.

Just how new some of them are may be judged by the fact that Jerome Sinclair — who came off the bench against West Brom to become, at just 16 years and six days, the club’s youngest player ever — was actually misnamed ‘Jordan’ Sinclair in the team-sheet.