Arsenal Women End Four-Year Trophy Drought In Continental Cup Final

The most successful club in the English women’s game, Arsenal ended the longest trophy drought in their modern history by winning the Continental Cup, defeating their perennial London rivals, Chelsea 3-1 to win their their first trophy in four years.

Arsenal’s victory was a record sixth in the English League Cup, sponsored by Continental Tyres, and their first honor since winning the Barclays FA Women’s Super League in 2019, ended a run of 1394 days without a major trophy.

Formed in 1987, Arsenal won their first major honor, the English Premier League Cup in 1992 simultaneously gaining promotion to the top flight of English women’s soccer. Thereafter, they became the pre-eminent force in the women’s game, the record title holders in every major competition and the only English side to win the women’s Champions League in 2007, then called the UEFA Women’s Cup.

However, since winning their 15th English league title in 2019, west London rivals Chelsea and Manchester City have won every single major domestic title with Chelsea in particular assuming Arsenal’s position as the country’s dominant force winning three successive English titles and four of the last six domestic Cup competitions. In two meetings so far in 2023, Chelsea had emerged with a fortunate draw away from home in the league before eliminating Arsenal from the Women’s FA Cup last Sunday with Sam Kerr scoring in both games.

Speaking to me earlier in the week, Arsenal captain Kim Little accepted that their opponents had replaced her team as the number one team in England. “Obviously, Chelsea have been dominant for the last number of years. We haven’t picked up a trophy. That’s not without will and want, we obviously want that as players and as a club. We need to continue to keep aiming for that and taking the right steps to getting back to that position we have been before as a club.”

“That feeling where you are playing, you feel dominant and really confident and obviously that’s a place maybe Chelsea are over us right now but we believe we have a really capable squad of high quality and when we’re at the top of our game, we can compete and win these trophies.”

When Arsenal fell behind after just 98 seconds to a goal from their nemesis, Australian forward Kerr, the match seemed set to follow a familiar script. Yet the early setback spurred Arsenal, and driven forward by the imperious Little, later elected as Player of the Match, they preceeded to monopolize the remainder of the first half

Sweden’s Stina Blackstenius, guilty of missing chances in the previous weekend’s defeat, equalized when the ball fell to her kindly in the penalty area. The evergreen Little, a goalscorer for Arsenal in their victorious Continental Cup Final victories in 2012 and 2013, then converted a penalty after a foul by Sophie Ingle on Katie McCabe. Brazilian defender Rafaelle headed home from a corner on the stroke of half-time, which was later credited as an own goal by Chelsea defender Niamh Charles.

The defeat was the second successive final loss for Chelsea in the competition having won the Continental Cup in 2020 and 2021. Ahead of the game, I asked their captain Magda Eriksson if their previous results against Arsenal would have any bearing on this weekend’s final.

She told me “it all depends on who is ready and who is up for it on that day. I think we’re not going to focus too much on beating them at the weekend. We know it’s going to be a new game with new challenges. We just have to be ready and switched on because, like you said, we lost the final last year. We don’t want to repeat that.”

Having gone into last year’s final against Manchester City, played on March 5, 2022, with a similarly impressive recent record against their opponents, Chelsea took the lead through a goal by Kerr only to cede control of the game and lose 3-1. Exactly a year on, history repeated itself almost identically.

The match, the 12th Continental Cup Final, was played at Selhurst Park, the Premier League home of Crystal Palace. The attendance of 19,010 was a record for the competition, more than double the crowd for the previous year’s final, a further indication of the seemingly unstoppable momentum of the women’s game in England.

Both Arsenal and Chelsea remain in contention for the Barclays FA Women’s Super League title and will meet again in the penultimate round of matches on May 21. Tantasingly, the teams could also face each other in the UEFA Champions League final having been drawn in separate halves of the draw, but for now, the first major trophy of the women’s domestic season has been won by Arsenal.