Chelsea drawn against Tottenham Hotspur in League Cup semifinal

Chelsea have reached the semifinals of the League Cup (i.e. Carabao Cup) for the first time since the 2017-18 season with tonight’s excellent 2-0 win at Brentford, which featured three full debuts from Academy players and plenty of rotation overall to save our legs and fitness. It was truly a win-win.

Our reward for that triumph will now be a date with Tottenham Hotspur, who dispatched West Ham United today. Incidentally, when we met Spurs in the FA Cup semifinal in 2017, Antonio Conte was on the Chelsea touchline.

The other semifinal will be between Arsenal and Liverpool, who staged a late-late show against Leicester City before prevailing on penalties. Arsenal easily beat third-division Sunderland in their semifinal yesterday.

Despite the current pandemic conditions, the semifinal is still scheduled as a two-legged affair — hopefully they will reconsider and make this just a one-off game like last year — with the first legs set to take place January 4-5 (Chelsea home) and the second legs to follow a week later, on January 11-12. (This means that we will be playing Spurs three times in January, with a league match also set for the 23rd.)