The full-time mood: bleak. The future for women’s football: dazzling

T he public bins: full to overflowing.Holloway Road underground station: so crowded as to be essentially impassable.The pubs: spilling out on to the pavements.The pavements: spilling out on to the streets.

Leah Williamson: for some reason, and to the general rapture of social media, pulling pints behind the bar at The Tollington.The programme queues: sizeable.The Emirates: sold out.The Arsenal men’s team: not playing tonight.The attendance the last time Arsenal played a Champions League semi-final at home, 16 years ago: 1,293.What the Champions League was called back then: the Uefa Women’s Cup.The record crowd for a game of women’s club football in the UK until tonight: 49,094.The record now: 60,063.The most frequent refrain you hear about women’s football: nobody cares.

Sign up to Moving the Goalposts

Informative, passionate, entertaining. Sign up to our weekly round-up of women’s football now.

after newsletter promotion

The mood: two parts frivolity to one part foreboding, a lightness and a heaviness, the giddiness of the occasion freighted by the buried awareness of what it all means.The tie: level after 90 minutes.The evening sun: reassuringly warm and low, casting a little strip of light along one touchline.Jonas Eidevall’s hair: gelled up so high above his head that the first three rows behind the Arsenal dugout have been reclassified as “restricted view” seats.The Arsenal team as they crouch for their pre-match photo op: not grim and stony-faced, not edgy or nervous, but broad and beaming, as if this is the front door to the best house party they have ever been to in their lives.Katie McCabe: sliding in to win the ball from an angle at which, frankly, only McCabe and perhaps Paul Scholes would even consider