Arsenal Women play Tottenham Hotspur at the Emirates on Wednesday evening, needing a win to take the WSL title race to the final day of the season.
The Gunners trail Chelsea by four points at the top of the table with this as their game in hand before the season finale on Sunday, when Arsenal travel to West Ham and Chelsea host Manchester United.
It will be the fourth time the women have played at the Emirates this season, with an early season victory over Chelsea in the WSL in September, a Champions League group stage defeat to Barcelona and a Champions League quarter-final first leg draw against Wolfsburg.
“We have loved every second of playing at the Emirates so far this season,” Arsenal manager Jonas Eidevall said in his pre-game press conference. “The Arsenal supporters have been great coming here and supporting us in good and bad moments and created a sense of unity for us here.
“We’re all just looking forward to going out there and creating a special night together tomorrow.” Eidevall was asked whether playing the game at the Emirates adds a layer of pressure on his players, with a defeat giving Chelsea their third consecutive WSL title but the Swede was uncompromising in his answer.
“I like being the Arsenal coach because it adds pressure, I don’t view that as a negative thing. I really enjoy that, it makes me feel alive. It brings out the best in you. I welcome that, I want to be a part of it.”
Arsenal thumped Spurs 5-1 in the FA Cup earlier this season but in the reverse fixture in the WSL, Spurs came within a whisker of their first ever win over Arsenal Women.
Vivianne Miedema’s stoppage time header gave Arsenal a 1-1 draw and while Spurs are massively improved this season, Eidevall was keen to point out that the November fixture happened in different circumstances.
“I don’t want to take credit away from Tottenham but the previous game was very, very hard. We had been away earlier in the week playing on artificial turf in Denmark (in the Champions League), we had the quickest turnaround that any team has had in the WSL this season (Wednesday night to Saturday lunchtime).
“We managed to get a point and it was a very hard fought point. This time it will be totally different conditions to that game. We have massive respect for this Spurs team and we know it will require a really strong performance from us but it’s a totally different game in very different conditions.”
Eidevall also suggested that his side should relish the pressure of the title race but not think ahead to the weekend and instead focus on the immediate task in hand.
“We have to focus on winning this game first, if we do that everything will be on the line on Sunday and we will definitely enjoy that but we need to do it ourselves tomorrow and that is where all of our focus needs to be. That has nothing to do with Chelsea, only Arsenal.”
The North London derby takes place at Emirates Stadium at 7.15pm on Wednesday and tickets are still available here for £12 adults and £6 concessions.
Disproportionate amount of womens football on the blog lately!
Does your computer not have a function to enable you to click on articles you want to read?
That must be so frustrating that it chooses random stuff for you to have to read. My heart breaks for you.
Hopefully, this website will cater to your peculiar circumstance – and since they charge so much for us to be on here, we can start a GoFundMe account to assist you.
I’d urge you not to conflate your tastes with everyone else’s. You can simply ignore the stories you aren’t interested in and read the ones you are, like every single reader of this site does already. It is not in the interests of any site to curate its content to individual specifications.
Good point, well put.
Yup. No point looking any further ahead than tonight’s opponents. Easy to say but harder to do. Sp*rs are annoyingly solid but if we keep our focus, we’ll be fine.