Hello, Arsenal Women aficionados!
There’s no smoke without fire, they say. On Saturday night, at Meadow Park, we should have seen a giant wildfire, but we ended up with a tiny campfire, instead. The team created so many chances and was so dominant that the one-nil scoresheet felt somehow disappointing.
We are through, though, and that’s all that really counts: the scar left by Paris FC is finally healed, the two-legged playoff tie is the final obstacle between us and some wonderful European nights under the floodlights and the lasting memories they create.
We’re not there yet, and the next two games will surely be much more difficult compared to those against Rangers and Rosenborg. The draw takes place on Monday, and our potential opponents are Juventus, Sporting CP, BK Häcken, Fiorentina or Paris FC. The good news is that we have a week to prepare for the first leg, and another week before the return leg. The bad news is that we will play Manchester City in-between as we kick-off the league campaign.
Jonas Eidevall was upset about those three games being squeezed over one week and called these qualifying rounds “a relic from the past”, but we made our bed, and we must sleep in it.
JONAS’ WORDS
The head coach looked relieved, more than anything else. The goal was to go through, no matter how, and we accomplished the mission. Speaking to the media, he lamented the lack of cutting-edge from his players and the missed chances:
“I think that the performance from a goal-scoring, opportunity-creation perspective is a quite good performance, but we need to score the second goal earlier. That would have made the second half a much different story than it was, and that’s probably the slight disappointment from today.”
Asked to go into more details about the performance, Jonas Eidevall said that “we need to combine being patient with, of course, being attacking-minded. I think a difference between the first and second half is that in the second half, we lost a little bit of patience, and we went into shorter and shorter attacks.
I think that plays a major role in how we defend: they got a lot of energy in the counter-attacking game because we didn’t make them work so hard in the defending moments. So, I think that is a learning point.”
We did play well though, and deserved to go through in a much more emphatic way, but our head coach could not hide his disappointment in this whole mini-tournament and the way it was set up, sending a not-so-veiled dig to UEFA:
“Now we’re through it, I can say it, it’s lucky an English team will not have to play in these mini tournaments again. For all the excitement that there is, it is a relic from the past. This is just done from a budget perspective, and that’s why they don’t even extend it to be played on Sundays. That’s why they cram it in on Saturdays, to save another hotel night.”
Again, that’s not UEFA who should get the blame here but rather us, and our inability to secure at least the second place in the league table…
LESSON LEARNED
Besides the patience thing mentioned by Jonas Eidevall, I think that the major learning moments from the narrow win against Rosenborg are two: Kyra Cooney-Cross rise in midfield and the role of Emily Fox in our attacking play.
The Australian midfielder benefitted from Lia Wälti’s absence and played really well in the lone pivot role, especially when tasked with finding wide players with long, diagonal balls. Although still a bit rough on the defensive side, she demonstrated the kind of calmness and control that allowed the team to sustain pressure and create triangles in the final third.
All in all, the former Hammarby player took her chance and showed everyone that she can be a reliable deputy in the number six role.
Moving on to Emily Fox, the US international is steadily becoming a major cog in our attacking play, making underlapping runs and drive forward through the right half-channel. This allows the right winger (Caitlin Foord, in this case) to hold the width and arrive late to the far post, unmarked, and could become a main theme against teams defending deep. This movement, paired with Mariona Caldentey drifting in from the left-hand side, increases the unpredictability of our attacking patterns and creates overloads through central areas, forcing opponents to commit players from their defensive line and potentially break those lines.
NEXT UP
As I write this, we are yet to know our opponents in the UWCL playoff tie so there is not much to say about the upcoming games. Of all the potential opponents, I would probably like a rematch with Paris FC, to make amends after last year’s debacle, although it might not be the easiest team to take on. Alternatively, a nice trip to Lisbon to check out the venue for the UWCL Final would be nice too, in case we need to travel back there in May…
All right, we will talk again once our opponents will be known, to dissect the draw and have a look at the team standing between us and the UWCL group stage. Also, with the transfer window officially closing on September 13th, I will release a comprehensive team guide with detailed profiles and fun facts.
Speak to you soon!
Italian living in Switzerland, Gooner since mid-nineties, when the Gunners defeated my hometown team, in Copenhagen. I started my own blog and podcast (www.clockenditalia.com) after after some experiences with Italian websites and football magazines. Covering Arsenal Women with the occasional rant about the boys.
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