> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Why “I Don’t Know” Matters in Women’s Football - URL: https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/why-i-dont-know-matters-in-womens-football/ - Published: 2026-08-13T07:00:22.000Z - Updated: 2026-08-13T07:00:21.000Z - Description: Sometimes the most useful thing we can say about Arsenal Women is simply that we don’t know - and there’s nothing wrong with that. - Author: Roberto Revilla - Tags: Features One of the questions I got after Arsenal’s [behind-closed-doors friendly against Crystal Palace](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/arsenal-women-beat-crystal-palace-2-1-in-first-pre-season-match/) came from Zoe Stephens, who asked me about [Caitlin Foord](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/tag/caitlin-foord/) being brought down just outside the area and whether I had any more detail on what happened, but she also asked something else: what were the two Arsenal elevens for each half? And the answer to that second question is, I don’t know. I know Arsenal changed the entire eleven at half-time because Arsenal told us that in their match report, but I haven’t seen Arsenal publish two complete team sheets and I haven’t seen anything from Crystal Palace that gives us that information either. If that changes and Arsenal release more information then obviously I can update you, but at the moment I don’t want to start assembling hypothetical elevens from individual names mentioned in a match report and then accidentally turn an assumption into a fact. And actually, when I was thinking about Zoe’s question, it got me thinking about something slightly broader because I’ve seen reports of this game appearing elsewhere online and, when you look at them closely, some are essentially rewrites of the information contained in Arsenal and Palace’s own reports. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that if they’re clearly reporting the information the clubs have released, but I think we need to be slightly careful when something suddenly contains very specific additional information from a match that was played behind closed doors. Because how do they know? And that’s not me suggesting that they don’t know. They might. Perhaps the journalist was there. Perhaps the outlet has a legitimate source at one of the clubs. Maybe somebody who attended has spoken to them. There are all sorts of perfectly reasonable explanations, and good journalists cultivate sources. That’s part of journalism. But if we don’t know where the information has come from, then we don’t know. I’m becoming increasingly interested in this as Trailblazers grows because women’s football is in this slightly peculiar place where the appetite for information has grown enormously, which is brilliant, but the reporting infrastructure around the game hasn’t necessarily grown at exactly the same speed. You have thousands and thousands of supporters wanting to know who trained today, who’s injured, who travelled, what formation was used in a friendly, who played in the first half, who played in the second half, and sometimes the information simply isn’t publicly available. And I think there’s a temptation then to fill that vacuum. I don’t particularly want to do that here. If I know something, I’ll tell you. If I’ve got a source I can rely on, I’ll tell you what that source says. If I’m offering you my interpretation of something, I’ll make it clear that it’s my interpretation. And if I don’t know, I’ll say I don’t know. I actually think “I don’t know” is quite an underrated sentence in football, particularly online. Because there’s something about football discussion, and perhaps social media generally, where apparently we’re all supposed to have an answer immediately. Something happens and within minutes people know why it happened, whose fault it was, what it tells us about a player, what it tells us about the manager and probably which position Arsenal need to strengthen before the transfer window closes. We saw a bit of that after Crystal Palace. Except, of course, we didn’t see it - none of us did, it was behind closed doors! And there’s another part of this that I don’t think we talk about very much, which is why a football club might actually want a pre-season game to be private in the first place. Pre-season isn’t simply about getting everybody running around again. Coaching teams are beginning to work on tactical ideas, patterns of play, combinations, set pieces and all sorts of things they may not particularly want their competitive opponents watching before the season has even begun. Do we really want to give any clues to Manchester City, Chelsea or potentially London City Lionesses about how this new-look Arsenal is going to set up and play? I don’t really. And I’m sure they feel exactly the same way about us. That doesn’t mean every behind-closed-doors friendly is some sort of top-secret tactical operation and Renée Slegers is standing at the gates of the Sobha Realty Training Centre with a Men in Black neuralyzer, although I appreciate some younger readers might not have the faintest idea what I’m talking about there, but there are perfectly ordinary sporting reasons why a club might decide that a particular training match is for the players and coaching staff rather than for us. Sometimes we just have to live with not knowing everything. Trust me, I know how that feels. I’m a fan as well. Although I do appreciate it’s slightly inconvenient when you’ve decided to start an Arsenal Women podcast and accompanying publication. And perhaps this is why I’ve become more conscious of how I talk about things here on Trailblazers, because I don’t want this to become somewhere where we simply repeat something often enough hoping that eventually it turns into fact. I’m quite happy to speculate. Football would be significantly less interesting if we weren’t allowed to wonder about things. I’m quite happy to look at what we know about a player and think about where she might fit into Renée’s team, or look at a signing and wonder what it might mean for somebody else, or look at the players being taken to pre-season and wonder whether that tells us something about who Renée wants to look at more closely. That’s part of the fun, but there’s a difference between saying, “I wonder if this means…” and saying, “This means…”, and sometimes that difference can disappear remarkably quickly online. You see a photograph from training and somebody isn’t in it. Within minutes, somebody asks where they are. Then somebody else wonders whether they’re injured, someone else says they’ve heard something, and before you know it, you’re three reposts down the line and apparently the player has suffered an injury, fallen out with the manager, asked to leave Arsenal and is currently negotiating personal terms with Barcelona. Meanwhile, she was probably just having a massage or an ice bath. We had a much more harmless version of this with [Leah Williamson](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/arsenal-women-pre-season-2026-27-inside-the-la-manga-training-camp/) travelling to La Manga. Leah wasn’t immediately obvious in the first photographs people saw, so supporters started wondering whether she’d travelled. There were photographs being examined, people trying to work out who they could and couldn’t see and various theories going around. Then another set of photographs appeared. There was Leah! Mystery solved. And none of that particularly matters. It was harmless and, actually, quite funny. But it’s a really good little example of what happens when there’s a gap in our knowledge. We really, really want to fill it. Sometimes we fill it with a question, which is absolutely fine, and sometimes we fill it with an assumption. And sometimes, if that assumption gets repeated enough, we forget that nobody actually established whether it was true in the first place. That’s where I think we need to be careful, particularly as interest in women’s football continues to grow because more people wanting more information is a fantastic problem to have. It means people care. They want to understand the players, they want to know what’s happening at the club, they want transfer news and injury updates and tactical analysis and training footage and everything else that supporters of the men’s game have become accustomed to having almost constantly. Women’s football deserves that level of interest. But perhaps part of the game growing is also accepting that the information around it needs to catch up. There will be occasions when reporters know things we don’t because they have access we don’t have. There’ll be journalists with excellent sources inside clubs. There’ll be people who attend matches we can’t attend, people who speak directly to players and coaches and people who spend their working lives building relationships that allow them to report things before they become public. That’s valuable. I’m not suggesting for a moment that we should distrust reporting simply because information hasn’t come directly from Arsenal. I just think we should retain that little bit of curiosity about where information has come from and, perhaps more importantly, be honest about the difference between what we know and what we think. I’m going to get things wrong occasionally, of course I am. There will probably be times when I interpret something one way and you interpret it completely differently, and that’s fine as well. You might even have information I haven’t seen, in which case tell me. This is supposed to be a conversation, not me sitting here pretending I have access to some enormous secret Arsenal database that nobody else knows about. What I don’t want to do is manufacture certainty because certainty sounds more authoritative. If the evidence takes us somewhere, we’ll go there, if we can reasonably draw something from what we’ve seen, we’ll talk about it, and if we’re speculating, we can speculate. And if a fan like Zoe Stephens asks me what Arsenal’s two elevens were [against Crystal Palace](https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/arsenal-women-beat-crystal-palace-2-1-in-first-pre-season-match/) and Arsenal haven’t published them? Then I don’t know. And I’m perfectly comfortable with that.