Show the fire not the fear
Handbrake Off: The Athletic FC's Arsenal show
The Athletic
4.6 • 731 Ratings
🗓️ 16 April 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amy Lawrence and Art de Roché join Ian Stone to discuss Arsenal’s 0-0 draw at home to Sporting CP in the quarter-final second leg on Wednesday, which saw Arsenal through to the semi-finals.
The panel reflect on the historic achievement of consecutive Champions League semi-finals for the first time in the club’s history, the need to cut through the negative discourse surrounding Arsenal, imploring fans to ignore outside noise, looking at the context surrounding Arsenal’s current circumstances and there’s praise for Zubimendi, Hincapie & Martinelli for their performances.
Plus, they look ahead to Manchester City on Sunday, respond to some listener messages, and we hear from Jack in Canada in this week’s instalment of ‘Up Your Arsenal’.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The Athletic FC |
| 0:03.3 | The only way to score is of course to play |
| 0:10.0 | with a handbreak-off. |
| 0:14.7 | Hello, I'm Ian Stone. |
| 0:15.8 | This is Hand-Break-off, |
| 0:16.6 | the Arsenal podcast, brought to you by The Athletic. |
| 0:19.9 | We're going to be talking about last night's |
| 0:22.7 | barnstorming nil-nil-nil draw at home to sporting CP in the Champions League |
| 0:28.6 | to see us qualify for the semi-finals for the second year running. |
| 0:34.1 | To do that, I'm joined by Art de Roche and Amy Lawrence. Morning. |
| 0:38.6 | Oh yeah? Good morning. Morning. Aren't you in the right seat? |
| 0:44.4 | Indeed. There's only one seat in my bedroom. Yeah. Yeah, you can't. If you don't understand that, |
| 0:51.2 | well, why aren't you spending all day watching Arsenal memes? Yeah, |
| 0:55.5 | Mikhail Tetta told our Art de Roche, sitting there now to move to another seat. But it was taken, |
| 1:01.6 | right? It was taken in the press conference. Someone had your seat. Yeah, basically, I mean, |
| 1:06.6 | I usually sit to his right because for people who don't know, the Arsenal press officer sits to |
| 1:13.0 | Mikkel's right. So I find it easier to catch the press officers I to get a question when I'm |
| 1:19.5 | sitting there. It's very, it's, I don't know that anyone else does that, but that's how my mind |
| 1:25.6 | works. So I usually sit there. But yeah, someone was in |
| 1:28.8 | the seat that I usually sit in and I wasn't expecting McHale to even bring up. So there's not |
| 1:34.9 | a plaque on there saying, art seat. Let's get this organized. Surely you've got one. Have you got |
| 1:41.8 | your own seat at the press? Are you serious? |
... |
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