Hello and welcome to Blue Rolti, a Londoners Blue podcast dedicated to the Chelsea Women's

team. I'm your host Jess Buhnupfries, joined today by Abdullah and not Chelsea Oli, a Manchester

City Oli. Oli is a writer, podcaster and Manchester City fan. Thank you for joining us today.

How are you doing? No problem. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah, I'm really

good. Thanks. Glad to be getting to talk about our women's team instead of, you know,

mostly the men's, which we do a lot in the city podcast world. We don't have many people

picking up our women's team, but always good to talk about them. Thank you for joining us.

Obviously, the reason we have got Oli on is because Chelsea are for the second year of a row,

playing Manchester City in the second game of the season. We are heading away this time to the

newly named Joy Stadium. So we're going to do a little bit of a preview today. But Oli,

I guess I just want to start off by asking you what has been sort of your perception of where

City of right now? I feel like generally in the media, in the Twitter sphere, whatever you kind

of dip your toe in, people are quite negative about City. They seem to have been one of the teams

to have really lost out to the Aston Villa hype machine, which isn't something I'd have thought I

be saying a year ago. But from your perspective, where do you sort of see the teams they are right

now? I think a lot of people's opinions on City still come from last year, the massive rebuild

they have to do last summer. I think we went into that season. I've never known a season where

expectations have been lower since I started following the women's team coming into that. But

this year, I think there is a bit more optimism because we've seen that we can get through a season

and do pretty well without the likes of Kyra Walsh, Georgia Stamwell, all those guys.

And some of the new signings that came in last year, Dana, Castellanos,

obviously Bunny Shaw stepping up in an amazing fashion, has really helped kind of bring

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