Caoimhin Kelleher has a strange history with Aston Villa.
It was he who stood helpless between the sticks as Dean Smith’s side ran riot against Neil Critchley’s baby-faced XI in the EFL Cup quarter-finals last December, thrashing a team of kids 5-0 while Jurgen Klopp and co were galivanting around Qatar.
The defeat was a demoralising one for a Liverpool team which, containing the likes of Luis Longstaff, Ki Jana Hoever and Tony Gallagher, will go down in history as the youngest ever fielded by the Merseyside giants in a competitive fixture – a record unlikely to be beaten.
But, for Kelleher, the match might have felt like something of a missed opportunity.
The Cork-born goalkeeper had a trial at Aston Villa in his teenage years but, for whatever reason, things never worked out for him in the Midlands and he ended up on Merseyside instead.
“Fulham was the first club he went for a trail with and then Aston Villa, and after that Liverpool. Then it was a case who was going to take him,” Paul Higgins, the treasurer of Kelleher’s former club Ringmahon Rangers, told the Irish Mirror in 2019.
It is now 12 months from that traumatic night at Villa Park and, before he was thrust in at the deep end for a crucial Champions League clash with Ajax, Kelleher had played just one more senior game under Klopp – an FA Cup victory over third-tier Shrewsbury Town.
But if Liverpool’s reserve keeper was feeling the pressure, with Alisson Becker injured and Adrian benched, he didn’t show it.
That remarkable reflex save from Klaas-Jan Huntelaar, denying Ajax what looked a certain equaliser with just minutes to go at Anfield, felt like a coming-of-age moment for a goalkeeper who woke up on Wednesday morning a Champions League hero for one of Europe’s biggest clubs.
Kelleher, in Klopp’s own words, had just produced a ‘top, top, top’ performance just when Liverpool needed him.
Villa Park must feel like a lightyear away.
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