Interim Arsenal Women boss Renee Slegers says her and her team have a sense of stability despite being in a holding pattern while Arsenal seek to appoint a long-term successor to Jonas Eidevall, who resigned last month. Slegers is still coy about whether she wants the job herself, insisting that between her current role, the fact that they are one coach and one analyst down in terms of staff and her three-year-old son at home, she hasn’t had time to consider whether she would like the role permanently.
However, Slegers says that her and her staff has instituted a sense of stability since the October international break. ‘We are settled as a staff in our roles on how we have picked things up in this block, so we are stable and we don’t work with question marks. We are consistent with what we are doing at the moment, we don’t have to worry too much about the future. We feel very settled and don’t need to ask questions or have too many thoughts about the future.’
Slegers said that her, the staff and the players discussed areas for improvement off the back of the October international break. ‘There were a couple of things we wanted to prioritise in block two and the staff and the players too sat down and looked at what we need to do better. Being calm, being clear and ruthlessness go together. If you are clear and calm about what you want, you can be ruthless in those moments. We are finding the right balance at the moment but we have to maintain that and do things even better.’
Arseblog News asked Slegers about her decision to bring Steph Catley into the team at centre=half ahead of Laia Codina and Lotte Wubben-Moy recently. The Dutch coach answered, ‘Steph has her qualities, she always brings the basics and the details which are things that people don’t always see, the way she covers spaces, the way she covers players, the details of her passes and her decision making are at a really high level. That is what Steph brings to the team, but we have Laia Codina, Lotte and Leah Williamson, we are in a luxurious position with centre-backs in the team.’
Slegers has picked Daphne van Domselaar in goal for all but one of her games in charge so far, with Zinsberger starting the 5-0 win over Brighton. Arseblog News asks whether how the keepers behave in possession informs that choice. ‘Two great goalkeepers but the number one job is to stop goals going in and most goals are scored by shots or finishes from crosses. It is most important to be good at that.
‘But clearly the way we play with possession football, we get a lot of the ball and the goalkeeper can play a good role for us with their passes both short and long and the right decisions in terms of finding the free player. They are both on a really high level, they work very hard with Naomi and Seb Barton our goalkeeper coach. They work together really well and they are not identical, they have differences but it is very good to have such good goalkeepers.’
Arsenal are away at Tottenham at 1.45pm on Saturday in the WSL, the match will be screened live on BBC One in the UK.
I’m interested to know how they feel about other punctuation. Can they work with an ellipsis? Would they take a forward slash? And how would they react to a big ol’ colon?!
They would probably take a snark mark .∼
I just don’t want a nasty conjunction that starts with an exclamation and ends with a player in a comma.
Who is the analyst who has left?
Anyway, looking forward to this – another big test. The players are taking responsibility for their own performances once again.
I also liked this from arsenal.com:
“…we have very intelligent football players on the pitch, so most of it, they’re going to manage themselves, and we’ll try to help from the sidelines.”
Hallelujah.