Arsenal are back in action in the Women’s Super League action on Sunday 11th December, when head to Villa Park to take on 5th place Aston Villa. Kick-off is at 16:15 UK. Arsenal’s Away Allocation of tickets have already sold out but you can watch the match live on Sky Sports.
Ahead of this weekend’s match, Jonas Eidevall spoke to the media. Here’s what he said on Aston Villa in his Arsenal pre-match press conference:
Eidevall confirmed that there was no new team news after the recent return of Leah Williamson and Rafaelle Souza and no likely return of Kim Little and Lina Hurtig for the Villa game.
Eidevall noted his frustration at Arsenal’s performance in the last two games, where our Gunners won both games but only with the narrowest of margins at 1-0 against both Everton and Juventus, saying I think going forward we need to do that better. Now we sit here with two 1-0 victories, and we’re all happy about that, but in both of these games, in the final minutes, both [opposition] teams have had free-kicks on the side that they haven’t been successful with. But we all know that the more times you let that happen, they will also be successful with that.
Rachel Daly is recognised as one of Villa’s star players and currently joint top goalscorer in the WSL this season. Eidevall talks about Rachel and the Villa threat saying She’s been tremendous. Coming back, it felt like she was scoring everything for a time. Villa are a good team – they have a lot of different threats. Rachel Daly has been phenomenal so far this season, but it’s not only her. Unfortunately it’s not that easy to only [focus] on her. We need to focus on Villa as a whole team in order to deal with them and get the result we want.
Indeed, Eidevall has a very healthy respect for Villa, Manager Carla Ward and the squad saying I think they were progressing [during] the whole spring. We played very well in that game when we won at home at Boreham Wood in the spring but, before that game, they were a really strong team and were really close to getting points at Chelsea. It went to the last minutes of that game before it was decided. We have massive respect for Aston Villa. We see them as one of the teams developing most in the league and Carla Ward is doing a tremendous job there. We know that they will be motivated, they will be ready for Sunday and we need to match that.
Aston Villa suffered a devastating 5-0 defeat at the hands of Man United in their last WSL outing and they will certainly not be expecting to lose by anything like that goal difference against Arsenal, particularly with our lack of clinical finishing in recent weeks. Let’s hope we have some Miedema Magic on the pitch tomorrow and that Blackstenius and Foord can actually find the net.
COYG!
Michelle Maxwell
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