Why winning the League Cup is crucial for Jurgen Klopp's Liverpool rebuild

In order for Liverpool to win later on, the club has to win now.

On Tuesday, the Reds eked past Stoke City in the semifinals of the League Cup. They lost 1-0 in regular time, although Marko Arnautovic's goal was pretty clearly offside, canceling out Jordon Ibe's goal in the first leg. But Liverpool prevailed in the seventh round of penalty kicks and is headed to the Feb. 21 final at Wembley, where they will face the winner of Wednesday's semifinal second leg between Manchester City and Everton.

To say that this is an important final is obviously to belabor a plain truth. Once-mighty Liverpool, winners of 18 First Division titles and five European Cups/Champions Leagues, have claimed just one piece of silverware in the last decade – also the League Cup, in 2011-12. For all the investment in the club's squad, a prize is overdue.

But winning this competition matters much more than for its own sake. Newish manager Jurgen Klopp plainly has a gargantuan task if he is to restore the club to its past glory. It's a job he seems eminently qualified for, after pulling off much the same feat with Borussia Dortmund where he rebuilt a fallen giant into a European power. Yet the sort of patience this work is going to require is in desperately short supply at a club like Liverpool or in a place like the Premier League.

More than simply make the fans happy – what is the point of competition but to win trophies, after all? – winning the League Cup will buy him time. For a few seasons at least, he'll be spared the when-was-the-last-time-we-won-something chatter that long plagued even Arsenal's ironman manager Arsene Wenger.

Even with the best of intentions and resources, it will take several years to pull off the kind of wholesale restructuring Liverpool needs. The player squad is a hodgepodge of signings by the last half dozen men and committees charged with forging a future. But all of them had different ideas on what that future looked like, resulting in a totally disjointed bunch of players. None of them, by the way, except for loanee Steven Caulker, were signed since Klopp arrived in October, meaning he had no say or influence in the composition of his squad.

It will take a year or two just to clear out and/or properly replace the players who are no use to him or don't quite match what he wants to do. And it will take at least as long to acquire the pieces that will fit into his philosophy – even though he likely won't be the one actually handling the transfer budget. Instilling his demanding playing philosophy will take time as well. And so too will the general culture change that will slowly creep into the club as it turns around its flagging fortunes.

Winning a League Cup might inflate expectations a tad, but reasonable supporters will also see that in the larger process this would merely represent a false dawn. An amuse bouche of sorts, for a main course to be consumed a few years from now.

But it would also validate the course the Reds are setting out on, even if they're merely at the start of it.

Leander Schaerlaeckens is a soccer columnist for Yahoo Sports. Follow him on Twitter @LeanderAlphabet.