The curse of the League Cup continues
Handbrake Off: The Athletic FC's Arsenal show
The Athletic
4.6 • 734 Ratings
🗓️ 23 March 2026
⏱️ 40 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Amy Lawrence and Adrian Clarke join Ian Stone to discuss Arsenal’s 2-0 defeat against Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final on Sunday
The panel reflect on the issues which resulted in a poor second half display, the knock on effects of missing key players through injury, whether the sentimental decision to choose Kepa over Raya was a mistake, the majority of Arsenal’s players underperforming, Saka’s drop off in form and the errors that lead to the goals conceded.
Plus, they discuss how the team can learn from this loss and find the courage to be more assertive in big games, before looking ahead to the opportunities the international break presents for Arteta, the Arsenal players and the fans.
If you like the panel’s song choices, check out the ‘Now that’s what I call Handbrake’ playlist on both Spotify and Apple Music and listen to them all there:
Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/gb/playlist/now-thats-what-i-call-handbrake/pl.u-d2b00jZuDxWk6P
Producer: Robby Williams
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
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. |
| 0:14.8 | Hello, I'm Ian Stone. |
| 0:16.0 | This is Handbreak-off, the Arsenal podcast, |
| 0:17.9 | brought to you by The Athletic. |
| 0:19.8 | We're going to be talking the 2-0 defeat |
| 0:22.2 | to Manchester City in the Carabelle Cup final on Sunday. To do that, I'm joined by Amy Lawrence |
| 0:27.8 | and Adrian Clark. Good morning. Hello. Hi. Amy took an inordinate amount of time to say hello there, |
| 0:36.7 | didn't she? That was just like a lot i mean |
| 0:38.8 | i know she was waiting for you to say it first adrian but there was actually i thought is her |
| 0:43.1 | zoom working she frozen she frozen no no she's there yeah amy you said it right before we get into it |
| 0:52.2 | right we've now lost seven league cup finals at a nine. |
| 0:55.9 | It's my fault. I miscounted on the last pod. So I might have, like, predicted it. |
| 1:01.3 | Blame me, set me on fire. Sorry. |
| 1:04.3 | I think that would be a little of an overreaction, but, uh, because, you know, even with your dodgy thumb, I think you'd have caught that ball better than Kevin did the first one. But anyway, anyway, we'll get to that. How do we lift the curse of the league up? We feel, me and Amy, we're talking about this age, and we feel there's a curse of the league cup, right? We've lost seven out of nine. What are we going to do? What we're going to do? Is it chicken blood? Is it, you know, something a bit more tribal? How do we get? How do we do that? |
| 1:32.2 | Well, I've looked into this and, goodness me, I've gone down a rabbit hole in the last 15 minutes of |
| 1:39.0 | how to remove curses. There's some quite a few interesting methods. But probably the most painless one is to sort |
| 1:46.4 | of have some kind of ceremonial bath, maybe together, apparently salt water, and you've got to |
| 1:53.9 | swirl it around. You've got to add 10 drops of rosemary oil, some tablespoons of dried rosemary. |
| 2:00.2 | And then you've just got to visualize that negative league cup energy and just wish it away. |
| 2:06.7 | And then you can wash it off. |
... |
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