That’s all for tonight. Congratulations to Newcastle, commiserations to Arsenal. We’ll be back tomorrow to find out who Newcastle will be playing at Wembley – see you then.
More from Eddie Howe
We worked a lot on set-plays this week because we knew Arsenal’s threat was so high. In the first leg we got lucky a couple of times and that influenced our team selection – we needed the height of Sven [Botman], Dan [Burn] and Fabian [Schar], especially as we were without Joelinton.
Jason Tindall and the analysts deserve a lot of credit. They put a lot of work into set-pieces and we defended them really well today.
[Did you send your players out to niggle them?] We’re always competitive. You have to be. You have to go up against your direct opponent and you have to be in their face. It wasn’t necessarily a direct order to be aggressive but we have to stand our ground, we have to win our battles. If that means a physical confrontation then, yeah, we back ourselves to mix it with them.
It’s huge. The first Wembley was brilliant, a bit unexpected, but we need to be there regularly. We need to feel like we’re there on merit, it’s not a surprise. I think we are there on merit this year. Our run hasn’t been easy. Look at who we’ve had to face – I think it’s four Premier League teams. We’ve done the hard yards and we’ve now got an opportunity. Hopefully we can learn from the last one and improve our performance. You have to learn from disappointing experiences and there are definitely things we can learn.
Since I’ve been here the fans have been absolutely magnificent and I’m so pleased they get another trip to Wembley. I just hope for them we can get a trophy.
