Missing magic Sensible criticism of me is fair. But please, stay out of my back garden

When should you take criticism seriously and when you should just ignore it? This has been on my mind since the Carabao Cup final Liverpool's victorious teenagers against the "billion-pound bottle jobs" of Chelsea. I found myself questioning Gary Neville's planned line. This Chelsea team are also young. You can cost £100m and still be young.

- “Max Rushden

Moving halfway across the world as a youngster may be more difficult than coming into the first team from within the stability of an academy. The Liverpool kids had some adults alongside them to shepherd them through the game.

And so my colleagues and I put these ideas out there on the Guardian Football Weekly podcast the following day. It wasn't so much a quest to change the narrative, more something interesting that might have been lost amid the justifiable praise for Jürgen Klopp.

The criticism, mainly - but not entirely - from Liverpool fans, was pretty strong. We had underplayed a chasm in experience between the two sets of players. We had missed the magic. We "should be ashamed".

It would be trite of a football journalist to get touchy about criticism when we spend our lives critiquing footballers. There are differences: questioning what happens on the pitch isn't personal. Criticism of a broadcaster is often by definition personal, especially when it begins "nothing personal but..." And we are being paid to give our opinion: it is our job-presumably because someone somewhere finds it interesting. It seems unlikely that @ davestoptheboats102843 is being paid to call me a nonce fair play if he is. What can be difficult, though,