Right, the clock has gone beyond 1pm so it’s time me to wrap up this, the second ever Guardian matchday live blog. We hope you’ve enjoyed this new addition to our weekend coverage,
We’ve given more than enough hype to the Bournemouth v Manchester United clash via John on the south coast and everything else, so it just leaves me to point you in the direction of our Women’s Champions League semi-final second leg coverage, which comes via Xaymaca Awoyungbo.
Enjoy today’s action. Join us for more of the same next weekend.
One more email comes from Philip on the subject of where to stage the FA Cup semis …
In an ideal world you would not have FA Cup semi-finals at Wembley but the FA cannot just move them. The difficulty is that the national stadium needs paying for and part of the mechanism for that is Club Wembley, which guarantees tickets to a series of events including the semis. The Club Wembley members have a long-term contractual arrangement which cannot be broken just like that.
As well as ticket sales falling short and unnecessarily long journeys, it leads to situations such as today’s fixture clash, though the congested calendar plays its part. It’s a mess and I don’t have an answer.
We can just blame the FA. But the FA consists of actual people and most of those there now were not there when the decisions about how to pay for the new Wembley were made about 20 years ago, and they don’t have magic wands.
