Merino’s brace seals historic night in Prague
Handbrake Off: The Athletic FC's Arsenal show
The Athletic
4.6 • 734 Ratings
🗓️ 5 November 2025
⏱️ 41 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amy Lawrence and James McNicholas join Ian Stone to reflect on Arsenal’s 3-0 win away to Slavia Prague in the Champions League on Tuesday.
The panel reflect on Arsenal’s ability to weather the early pressure from Prague, their feelings about the team conceding a shot on target, Max Dowman becoming the youngest player in Champions League history and Mikel Merino’s intelligence and continued ability to make it count in the box.
Plus, they look ahead to Sunderland away in the Premier League on Saturday evening and we hear from Royston in Los Angeles in another segment of ‘Up Your Arsenal’.
Producer: Robby Williams
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | The Athletic FC. |
| 0:07.1 | The only way to score is, of course, to play with a handbreak-off. |
| 0:14.7 | Hello, I'm Ian Stone. This is Handbrake-Off, the Arsenal podcast, brought to you by The Athletic. |
| 0:19.2 | We're going to look back on Arsenal 3-0 win away to Slavia Prague in the Champions League last night |
| 0:25.1 | and look at it to our game against Sunderland on Saturday. |
| 0:27.5 | I'm joined by Amy Lawrence and welcome back to James McNicholas. |
| 0:31.6 | Good morning. |
| 0:32.3 | Yay! |
| 0:33.8 | Thanks guys. |
| 0:34.7 | Nice to be back. |
| 0:35.6 | James just told us a great story about Azora Mam Mamdani, the new mayor of New York, |
| 0:41.3 | contacted him for tickets three years ago for the Arsenal because he's a massive Arsenal fan. |
| 0:45.3 | And you blanked him. |
| 0:48.2 | It went in my requests folder, you know what I mean? |
| 0:51.5 | And I mean, the real question is who else is in there? |
| 0:54.3 | What dignitaries, politicians, Hollywood superstars have been sending me DMs, you know, unreplied. Anne Hathaway, possibly. And Hathaway's in there, yeah. So, but congratulations to Zoran. I mean, yeah, nice to see a gooner in office. Quite, quite. In fact, a friend of mine, I spoke to her the other day in New York, she said as she was coming in to vote in Arsenal fair, going on an Arsenal show was coming out, and she felt that was a good omen. And I said, well, well, we're in good form at the moment. So, yes, that's obviously been passed along to Zoran. If you watch the game on TNT Sport last night in the UK, |
| 1:31.4 | the commentary went a bit reggae dub for about 10 minutes, didn't it? |
| 1:35.7 | Martin Keone doing a bit of reggae dub. |
| 1:38.4 | And then it went quiet for about five minutes. |
| 1:40.8 | Then they went back to the studio and O'Ne Hargreaves and Anita Asante |
| 1:44.0 | had to busk it for about 15 minutes while they fixed the technical hitch. I can't say they were exemplary, but they did a job, I guess. They filled in. They were thrown into the deep end. You ever been thrown into the deep end and how did it go? James, any moments when, I mean, you've done improv for goodness sake. So you have been |
| 2:03.4 | thrown in the deep end. Yeah. I've got a story about this. I was off filming the last few weeks, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Athletic, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Athletic and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.