Carabao Cup final, WSL and more Premier League drama – follow with us
Normally the Premier League weekend starts here, but David Tindall will have the reaction to Friday night’s Bournemouth v Manchester United game as well as the buildup to the day’s action.He will be looking at the fallout from Thomas Tuchel’s England squad selection, as well as looking forward to the day’s four Premier League games.It’s a full-on day in the Championship, too, with Middlesbrough’s recent stumbles opening up third-placed Ipswich’s shot at automatic promotion – except they are at home to a fourth-placed Millwall side motivated by injustice, after losing against Blackburn in a game that turned on a red card that was subsequently annulled.Send your thoughts on anything to do with the day’s games to matchday.live@theguardian.
com Read nowDo we have a WSL title race? Manchester City could only draw at Aston Villa last weekend, and the pack have a chance to put a bit of pressure on them if the leaders slip up again at home to Tottenham.Chelsea at least closed to within seven points in midweek and are at London City Lionesses, while Arsenal – four points worse off than Chelsea but with two games in hand – are at struggling West Ham.Emillia Hawkins will have all the goals from those matches plus the visit of Everton to Manchester United, who will regret only drawing at West Ham on Wednesday when they could have cut City’s lead to six points.As Ed Aarons wrote in our things to look out for this weekend: “The Amex has not been a happy hunting ground for Liverpool in recent years: they have won only once at the ground in their last five visits and that was in the Carabao Cup last season.” Can Brighton – who like the Reds have three wins in their last five league matches – frustrate Arne Slot’s men again? When the sides met on the south coast last May, the visitors had been partying as champions so the late defeat barely stung, but losing again would threaten their top-five hopes.
Scott Murray follows the action minute-by-minute, while Sam Cunningham reports from Sussex by the sea.“O tempora, O mores,” as Cicero would say: there is only one Premier League game with the traditional kick-off time this weekend, as European outsiders Fulham take on a Burnley side who would love to have that status.But there are seven Championship games, with teams hoping to respond to or take advantage of results in the lunchtime matches, while Southampton, at home to Oxford, and Wrexham, at Sheffield United, will keep an eye on each other on the edge of the playoff zone.In Scotland, the three title contenders have staggered kick-off times, with Hearts getting the chance to put pressure on Rangers (an evening match) and Celtic (in Sunday’s game).Billy Munday is at the helmNot a fixture noted for its historical needle but recent quasi-judicial announcements have spiced up the first staging at Hill Dickinson Stadium.
As Andy Hunter writes: “It is a fine coincidence that Chelsea’s first Premier League game since being fined for breaching financial rules during Roman Abramovich’s ownership should be at Everton, the club the Premier League made an example of when reinforcing its authority over disobedient members,” Andy himself will be on match report duty, while Rob Smyth will be listening out for the pointed chants as the game goes on,Only five points separate the sides, and a home win would cap a painful week for Liam Rosenior, despite his successful mole hunt,The day’s last Premier League game features two managers who have defied expectations,Keith Andrews was seen as having a stiff task after succeeding Thomas Frank at Brentford, with key players having left and no experience of the top job, but has fared rather better than the Dane did at Tottenham.
Daniel Farke, meanwhile, seemed to be on his way out of Leeds in December but only four defeats in their past 20 games has turned things around in the league and brought an FA Cup quarter-final,Leeds are only three points clear of the drop zone, mind, and Brentford need points to reach Europe,Dominic Booth will give live updates, while Will Unwin reports from Elland Road,With all due respect to Saturday’s combatants, Sunday has the three games that are the pick of the weekend, and Emillia Hawkins will have all the buildup,There’s the north-east championship match as Newcastle host Sunderland; there’s Tottenham v Nottingham Forest in the archetypal relegation six-pointer; and there’s Arsenal v Manchester City in the Carabao Cup final.
Plus, she will have reaction to all Saturday’s matches.Email matchday.live@theguardian.com with your views.It was a sobering week for Newcastle, after a promising start at Barcelona as they twice equalised gave way to a humiliating 7-2 (seven-two) scoreline.
Still, Jacob Ramsey’s pass for the seventh was surely not the most embarrassing moment of Newcastle’s season: that honour lies with Nick Woltemade’s headed own goal that decided December’s derby,The chances of a rematch with Barça any time soon look remote, but luckily for Eddie Howe there is a shot at parochial redemption when Sunderland visit the Toon at noon,Luke McLaughlin steers the live blog, while Louise Taylor is at St James’ Park,A clash between the two sides immediately above the relegation zone kicking off at the same time as the team just below them are playing – meaning anyone losing this match could be in the bottom three at the final whistle – is one to have the fans sweating,Spurs and Forest arrive bolstered by European victories, albeit the former still went out of the Champions League despite a first win for Igor Tudor and the latter needed a shootout to put paid finally to Midtjylland.
Any feelgood factor from those results, and from Spurs’ creditable draw at Anfield last Sunday, would be wiped out by defeat, regardless of how West Ham were faring at Aston Villa,Rob Smyth will have live updates, before reports, reaction and analysis from Ben Fisher and Jonathan Wilson,Only one side are still chasing a clean sweep, after Real Madrid once again got the better of Pep Guardiola in the Champions League, but has there ever been a higher stakes League Cup final? It’s the quadruple hunters of Arsenal up against the treble chasers of Manchester City, with apprentice Mikel Arteta in one dugout against master Guardiola in the other, first in the Premier League against second,The only League Cup final we can find between the two sides that finished the season first and second was 1978, when the eventual champions, Nottingham Forest, beat the eventual runners-up, Liverpool, in a replay,To borrow a phrase popularised by Phil Thompson’s reaction to that loss, Daniel Harris will be first with news of who finishes the game sick as a parrot, while David Hytner, Jamie Jackson and Barney Ronay are at Wembley.
Meta AI agent’s instruction causes large sensitive data leak to employees
An AI agent instructed an engineer to take actions that exposed a large amount of Meta’s sensitive data to some of its employees, in the latest example of AI causing upheaval in a large tech company.The leak, which Meta confirmed, happened when an employee asked for guidance on an engineering problem on an internal forum. An AI agent responded with a solution, which the employee implemented – causing a large amount of sensitive user and company data to be exposed to its engineers for two hours.“No user data was mishandled,” a Meta spokesperson said, and they emphasised that a human could also give erroneous advice. The incident, first reported by The Information, triggered a major internal security alert inside Meta, which the company has said is an indication of how seriously it takes data protection
Cryptocurrency firms suffer heavy losses in Illinois primaries after spending big
The cryptocurrency industry spent big and lost often in this week’s Illinois primaries.As the industry prepares to make massive donations in the 2026 midterm elections to replicate its success in 2024, the Illinois losses mark an early setback for firms that are trying to establish themselves as power players in American politics.Crypto companies flooded the state’s Democratic primaries with millions of dollars to promote candidates they believed would have a light touch when it came to regulating digital assets. AI firms, meanwhile, backed opposing candidates and seemed to cancel each other out.Using Super Pacs that are allowed to spend unlimited sums of money, crypto and AI companies ran television advertising and distributed campaign fliers that only occasionally alluded to their industries
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Liz Kendall is right to warn that the UK must not let quantum computing talent slip through its fingers (UK must learn lessons from AI race and retain its quantum computing talent, says minister, 17 March).However, UK Research and Innovation’s current funding decisions risk doing exactly that.The government has announced £1bn for quantum computing, but it is cutting support for fundamental research in particle physics, astronomy and nuclear physics (PPAN). These are not separate issues. It is precisely the kind of blue-sky research funded through PPAN that trains the scientists and develops the ideas that underpin emerging technologies like quantum computing
US startup advertises ‘AI bully’ role to test patience of leading chatbots
Imagine a day at work where your main task is to pick a fight with a computer. No meetings, no emails – just you, a chair and a chatbot with the maddening tendency to think it has the cleverest mind in the room.The job title alone raises an eyebrow: “AI bully”. But this is precisely what a California startup called Memvid is offering: $800 to spend eight hours testing the patience and memory of artificial intelligence.“You’ll spend a full eight-hour day interacting with leading AI chatbots – and your only job is to be brutally honest about how frustrating they are,” the company’s job listing states
‘All right mate?’: Amazon pins UK hopes on AI upgrade of Alexa
“Commiserations, mate, Chelsea lost 3-0 in the Champions League last night against Paris Saint-Germain,” says Alexa as it attempts to break the news gently to an awaiting Blues fan.Such is the injection of personality and understanding that Amazon hopes will lead to Britons re-engaging with their millions of Alexa devices, restoring it to the cutting edge of voice assistants rather than resigned to being a glorified egg timer.After its early access launch last year in the US, the long-awaited generative AI upgrade Alexa+ is finally making its debut in the UK, supporting eight years of existing devices strewn through more than half of UK households.With the UK being Amazon’s most engaged market and more than 40 accents to contend with across the UK and Ireland, the “next-generation ambient AI assistant” has its work cut out for it.The service will be available immediately for new purchases of Amazon’s latest generation of Echo and Show devices, with an invite system in operation for existing devices, which Amazon’s head of Alexa and Echo, Daniel Rausch, insists will progress faster than it did in the US
‘We don’t tell the car what it should do’: my ride in a self-driving taxi
Driverless ‘robotaxis’ will be accepting fares in Britain’s biggest city by the end of next year. Can they deal with London’s medieval roads, hordes of pedestrians and errant ebikers? I got in the passenger seat to find out‘I’m really excited to show you this,” says Alex Kendall, the CEO of Wayve, as he gets behind the wheel of one of the company’s electric Ford Mustangs. Then he does … nothing. The car pulls up to a junction at a busy road in King’s Cross, London, all by itself. “You can see that it’s going to control the speed, steering, brake, indicators,” he says to me – I’m in the passenger seat
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