Arsenal Women boss Jonas Eidevall says that he will eventually take a holiday this summer but, with a young family, it’s unlikely to be especially relaxing.
The Gunners manager leads his team into their final WSL game at home to Aston Villa on Saturday on the cusp of taking the final UWCL qualification spot. For Manchester City to overtake them, they have to beat Everton and Arsenal have to lose to Aston Villa with a 12 goal swing in City’s favour in the process.
Eidevall was asked how he will switch off during the summer and whether he might catch up on some Netflix. “All those things are in my dreams! With three-year-old twins they are not the reality! I thought last summer I might do that but now I know! It is definitely being at the beach, not relaxing!
“I will be building sand castles, putting on sun screen and making sure muffins don’t have too much sand on them. It’s going to be a busy summer. There will be no time to think about Arsenal when we are on the beach and I will enjoy it.
“There will be other years for Netflix and just lying on the beach to relax.” Arseblog News asked Jonas Eidevall about the toll on him personally in trying to lift and motivate the group through a severe injury crisis.
“Sometimes as a coach, those are things (your own mental state) you neglect the most because you really don’t think you have a choice and that you need to be there for the team.
“You have to put all those other things aside. That is the part when, in off-season, you have to try to recharge and recover. But these are the things that make certain people coaches and maybe doesn’t make other people coaches.
“You want to put other’s needs in front of your own. That’s a good starting point if you want to be a coach.” Meanwhile, with Chelsea on the cusp of a fourth consecutive WSL title, Eidevall says his team needs to stick to their process, as well as bolstering in the transfer market, to challenge them next season.
“It is like going to the gym, if you just go to the gym once for ten hours, you are not going to get in shape, you are probably going to get injured.
“If you stick to a process and you go to the gym almost every day and you go for 45 minutes and you follow a plan, eventually you will get into shape.
“It might take a month, two months, a year, whether you are going to get fitter than your competitor. You can’t really put a guarantee on a timeline but you need to stick to a process and do what you believe in.
“That is what we need to do and what others need to do and we need to do that better than Chelsea, that is of course very hard.”
COYGG
Very wise.