Sonia Bompastor reveals which three Chelsea stars will miss League Cup final

Chelsea head coach Sonia Bompastor has confirmed that Keira Walsh, Naomi Girma and Guro Reiten will all miss Saturday's Subway Women's League Cup final against Manchester City.

Girma, who penned a world-record deal during the January transfer window, had her Chelsea debut cut short after suffering an injury in the side's 2-2 draw with Brighton & Hove Albion.

Blues head coach Bompastor has said that Girma will not be fit to face City this weekend, and is being assessed "week by week".

Lionesses midfielder Keira Walsh will also miss Saturday's Cup showdown, but Bompastor has confirmed that her return is imminent. As for star forward Guro Reiten, the head coach says that she will take "longer" and is unlikely to play before the international break at the end of March.

Bompastor also provided an update on Sam Kerr, who has been out of action for 15 months after rupturing her anterior cruciate ligament in January 2024.

The Blues head coach has confirmed that Kerr has been named in the squad for the knockout stages of the Champions League, meaning American forward Mia Fishel misses out.

"I made the decision, I spoke with my players. Sam Kerr will be the one in the Champions League squad, and Mia Fishel won't be in the squad for the Champions League this season. So yeah, it was a difficult decision to make because the players will always want to be in the squad. But I spoke to them, I explained why I made that decision and I think the most important thing is now it's clear for everyone."

Chelsea will face a new-look Manchester City side this weekend, following the immediate dismissal of head coach Gareth Taylor. Former City boss, Nick Cushing, will now take the reins on an interim basis for the remainder of the season.

"He [Cushing] has a lot of experience. He already won lots of titles with Man City Women before. So I think preparing this game, we probably know City won't change lot of things, they have brilliant principles, and we expect them maybe not to change a lot from what we saw before," Bompastor analysed.

"I think we just need to be going into this game with confidence. I think the results we have got until now are really good and we are in a good place in terms of being confident. We expect a really hard and difficult game, because Man City has a really good squad, good players, top class players, but we just feel we are ready to go into the game on Saturday and face a really good team."

This showpiece fixture is the first in an unprecedented series of four consecutive matches between these two shades of blue. Chelsea travel to Manchester just four days later in the Champions League. They will face off in the second leg of the European quarter-finals the following week before meeting once more in the Women's Super League (WSL) shortly after.

Bompastor previewed how her side aim to manage the four meetings in 14 days, highlighting the importance of squad depth.

"We looked at these four games, and I said that we'll take them one by one. We need to anticipate and look at the bigger picture and all the block. So when I say that, of course, in terms of management, this is where it's really important to have depth on the squad.

"We know it won't be possible for all the players to play four times 90 minutes. So this is where we need to be prepared to rotate the squad. We already how we want to do that, the different games, different competitions."

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