Morning all.
Let’s start this morning with Arsenal Women who are through the semi-finals of the Champions League after an aggregate 3-2 win over Chelsea. It seems there was drama, with the Chelsea manager enraged by a hair-pulling incident involving Katie McCabe late on, which saw Sonia Bompastor red carded.
She was so furious, she brought her phone into a post-game interview to show the incident, and thus made herself the subject of a million memes doing the rounds on social media this morning. This one was my favourite, as it reminds us of what a rotten institution Chelsea is a whole. Your mileage may vary, of course:
Bonus… 🔎🧐On request from @drheadgear.bsky.social 😉
— Prashant 🌊 (@prasshant.bsky.social) 2026-04-01T22:16:21.974Z
I understand why they might be upset, but this is a club that should have been bankrupt, and instead cheated its way to years of success with billions of Abramovich’s oligarch blood money, so maybe there’s a little thing in this universe called ‘karma’. It seems to be far too randomly and infrequently applied, but when it delivers we shouldn’t ignore it.
Afterwards, Renee Slegers (whose full reaction you can find on Arseblog News), said of the incident:
I’ve seen the incident back. I don’t think it’s deliberate. I think she tries to pull the shirt. Alyssa Thompson is very fast. I think Katie is very competitive. She wants to win. You see that and the way she plays. But for me, she always plays fair. She would never do anything deliberately bad with bad intentions. I haven’t spoken to Katie yet, so I can’t comment on how she would comment on this situation.
While Katie McCabe said on her Instagram:
I just want to clarify that I was genuinely reaching for the shirt, I wouldn’t ever want to pull someone’s hair. Full respect to Thompson.
I think we have to take her at face value there with regards the hair-pulling.
As an aside, I remember when I used to write columns for ESPN, there was an editor there who would refer to us only by our surnames. James was doing stuff there at the same time too, and we’d get emails saying, ‘Ok, we need Mangan on Thursday to cover X, and on Friday McNicholas can write about Y’. It was quite annoying, and maybe it’s just my issue, but I never felt full respect when someone didn’t use my first name. Oh well! Water under the bridge now [insert your own gag here including the words ‘Stamford’ and ‘Chelsea tears’].
The point is, Arsenal are through, ready to take on the winners of the game between Lyon and Wolfsburg this evening. The German team have a 1-0 lead from the first leg, but they still have a lot of work to do against a side who have won this competition more than any other.
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As for the men, we can start the build-up to Southampton in the cup tomorrow, but the lads will be back in full training today, and we’ll have to wait and see who is involved and what kind of updates Mikel Arteta provides in his press conference tomorrow. Will there be subterfuge in the training pics? Probably not for an FA Cup game, but let’s see.
The one player I definitely want to see involved is Martin Odegaard. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect him to come back after another injury absence this season and be the very best version of himself, but with Eberechi Eze out, we need the captain’s quality and influence, and fingers crossed some minutes at St Mary’s will be useful to prepare him for Premier League games which are, in my mind at least, more important to our season.
Beyond that, not a lot going on this morning. Perhaps though, this is the last bit of calm before the storm of the run-in, so we should enjoy it while it lasts. It won’t last long. If you need something to listen to, we’ll have an Arsecast for you later on, and for our Patreon members a new episode of Waffle in which James and I answer questions about anything and everything expect Arsenal. You can get that here, main pod out in the mid-afternoon.
Until then, have a good one.