Chelsea suffered a heavy defeat in last season’s League Cup final and lost another Wembley final, but it’s a brand new season with brand new hopes and expectations and we can look forward to doing even better.

Unlike last season, we will enter this competition in the third round as usual (thanks to our place in the UEFA Conference League), but our fixture list will likely be even busier than usual, with the season extending into the summer with the FIFA Club World Cup.

More importantly, our first opponents in this year’s League Cup have just been announced and it will be League Tow team Barrow AFC! That’s really nice and pretty cool. We’ve only played Barrow once before, back in 1948, in the FA Cup.

The game will be played after the international break on either Tuesday 17th September or Wednesday 18th September, or the following week. (We play Bournemouth the weekend before and West Ham the weekend after, both away; the Conference League group stages, should we make it that far, start in the first week of October.)

The full draw for the third round of the Carabao Cup is as follows:

Liverpool vs West Ham United
Manchester City vs Watford
Arsenal vs Bolton Wanderers
Manchester United vs Barnsley
Wycombe Wanderers vs Aston Villa
Coventry City vs Tottenham Hotspur
Walsall vs Leicester City
Brentford vs Leyton Orient
Blackpool vs Sheffield Wednesday
Preston North End vs Fulham
Everton vs Southampton
QPR vs Crystal Palace
Stoke City v Fleetwood Town
Brighton & Hove Albion vs Wolverhampton Wanderers
AFC Wimbledon vs Newcastle United
CHELSEA against Barrow AFC