Max Rushden is joined by Barry Glendenning, Jonathan Liew and Nooruddean Choudry as Liverpool extend their lead at the top of the Premier League

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On the podcast today: Nottingham Forest record a huge win over Manchester City as their dream of Champions League football returning looks even closer to reality. Victories for Chelsea, Brighton and Aston Villa will also have left the champions concerned.

• Final: India, 254-6, bt N Zealand, 251-7, by four wickets
• Rohit smashes 76 after Kiwis unable to set big target

And so ends an impressively ­fatuous experiment: what happens when the best side in the world get the dice loaded in their favour? On a ­sultry night at the Dubai International ­Stadium, we got the entirely foreseeable answer. Pakistan’s tournament is India’s glory, by four wickets with six balls to spare: a triumph that felt as immaculately controlled as the months of sabre-rattling and politicking that preceded it.

None of which is to diminish the acclaim due to India’s players: men of skill and men of character, men who step up and deliver under pressure. They did not devise the format in which everyone else travelled, toiled and adapted while they stayed put. They did not construct the apparatus of a global game run in the interests of one country.

Wide defender unleashed as penalty-box poacher has been a subtle trend, but can the system ever work long-term?

“You’re asking for specialists throughout the team,” Gary Neville said recently of the wing-back system. Which presumably came as news to Daniel Muñoz, who before becoming one of the Premier League’s leading wing-backs had never actually played the position before.

Of course Muñoz – a winger in his youth – always had a strong sense of his true calling. In his first season at Nacional in his native Colombia, he scored seven goals from right-back. In his last full season at Genk in Belgium, he scored 11 as Wouter Vrancken’s side came agonisingly close to the league title. “I always liked being where a striker should be on the pitch,” he told Crystal Palace’s website last year. But it was Palace, and more specifically Oliver Glasner, who gave Muñoz full rein in the role he has now made his own.

Something seemed to break here, and it was not just Xabi Alonso’s proud unbeaten record over Bayern Munich. For Vincent Kompany’s side are cruising to the Bundesliga title and now they are cruising to the Champions League quarter-finals too. They may well sign Bayer Leverkusen’s best player in the summer, but here they played him off the park. It smells like game over, and in more senses than one.

This week the Bayern director of sport, Max Eberl, made an eye-catching comparison. He compared Alonso and Kompany to Pep Guardiola and Jürgen Klopp, the coaching duopoly that shaped modern football for almost a decade. Bit soon for all that, most people reckoned, but it feels just a little less fanciful now. The bloke who got Burnley relegated to the Championship may just be the next big thing in European coaching.