Hello and welcome to the Arsenal Women AskCast on AskBlog.com with me, your host, Tim Stillman,

with a March international break mailbag edition.

Apologies that we haven't had an episode for a couple of weeks. Brighton, the game didn't

happen, so we didn't really feel like doing an hour and a bit on the pitch inspection, which

I did see live in the stadium, the first time I've ever seen one, to be fair.

And with the Bristol City game, we didn't do, we didn't kind of revert to our usual programming and do a Monday podcast because there was no way for Jamie to see the game since it wasn't broadcast.

Well, not just overseas, but anywhere.

And we'll talk a little bit about that at the top of the show.

But before we do, let me introduce our co-host, Jamie Spanger. Jamie, how are you doing? I'm good, Tim. I'm good. I miss chatting football with you, Tim. It feels like this international break usually we're quite relieved for these breaks as an national fan and reporter. But this one feels a little bit ill-timed. I feel that we're

finally getting into groove. We love playing good football in the back end of a season when

stuff maybe doesn't matter as much. But very good results across the board in the cup competitions

and yeah, a lot to speak about. So yeah, excited to get into it. And, you know, Asian Cup coming up. I'm excited for

that one. How do you rate the Matilda's chances on home soil? And I mean, one of the things,

I actually listened to Joe Montemoreau this week. And, you know, he was talking about how this

Matilda's team that's been together for eons

hasn't won a trophy, actually, which feels, given that quite a lot of these players are going

into their 30s, feels strange. How do you rate the Matilda's chances of bringing it home on home

soil? Yeah, to be honest, I'm so excited for this tournament.

It's going to be amazing.

I'm heading up to Sydney for the final, which should be great, no matter who is in it, but obviously hoping it's green and gold. This tournament will be interesting because, yeah, the Matildas aren't always the best performers when it comes to the Asian Cup. We only qualified for the World Cup, because this is our World Club qualifiers. We're only qualified for the one in 2020 because we were the home nation.

We crashed out in the quarterfinals of the last tournament. So it's not a tournament that we're usually very well pronounced in. And like you said, Tim, it's interesting because this golden generation is almost fading. It feels like this is the last chance. But then you're in a weird middle ground now where there's a lot of newer players coming and being integrated into this national team and having a big role in this national team as well.

So I'm excited. I think it's more of a difficult group that people may let on.

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