A year ago Jordan Nobbs sat on the sidelines nursing her ruptured anterior cruciate ligament as an Arsenal side captained by Kim Little lost the Continental Cup final to Manchester City on penalties. On Saturday Arsenal are back in the final, this time against Chelsea, and with Little on the sidelines while Nobbs wears the armband.

Nobbs’ injury kept her out of the game for nearly a year, also forcing her to miss last summer’s World Cup, but she has emphatically proved both her fitness and her undiminished ability since returning in August: only three Arsenal players have made more appearances this season and only one has more goals than the 27-year-old midfielder.

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“There were really difficult moments,” she said. “You come through an ACL injury and I think it’s just getting your rhythm back, you feel like you haven’t played football for a really long time. I’ve just had to believe in myself and it took a few words with [Arsenal’s manager] Joe Montemurro to keep me confident and get back into this team. Eventually you’ve just got to look at yourself and start performing. I wasn’t thinking about leading Arsenal into cup finals – I just wanted to be playing.”

Arsenal have won the League Cup five times and reached seven finals – Nobbs created the only goal for Vivianne Miedema when they last won it in 2018 – but this will be Chelsea’s first. “It’s a key game for us. If we’re not winning trophies we’re not in the place we want to be,” Nobbs said. “The Continental Cup seems to be one we like to win and I’ll be going out there with the same mentality as always. We’ve been a club that has created history and the reason for that is that we want to win and we want to win everything.”

Arsenal won last season’s WSL title at a canter but their defence is proving less straightforward. They are third, three points behind Chelsea and four from Manchester City, albeit with a game in hand on the leaders, and having lost to both in the last month. Chelsea have won the teams’ last three meetings and have not lost a domestic match all season.

Though Arsenal will be hampered by the absence of the injured trio of Little, Beth Mead and Lia Wälti, Nobbs sees the final as an opportunity to “hopefully knock a bit of confidence out of them” – but playing such familiar opponents can present a particular set of problems.

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“Sometimes because of the expectation and knowing the opposition, you might not approach it with the detail you’d normally approach someone new,” Montemurro said.

“So it can become tricky, and I think it’s more difficult sometimes to play the same teams and the same scenarios over and over again. But we have to be prepared, we have to expect certain things and we have to make sure we’re in the right mindset to play a team we know well. We know their strengths, we know their weaknesses and we have to make sure we take care of the situation.”