Arsenal Women defeated Charlton Athletic 4-0 in the Conti Cup on Sunday afternoon. Tim Stillman caught up with skipper Jordan Nobbs post-match exclusively for Arseblog News.
On playing the full 90 minutes for the second time in a week…
Yeah we planned this ahead of this week, now we want to build my minutes and get me game time in a close space of time. For me it was great to get those minutes under my belt, with a short recovery time to show my body is getting stronger and fitter and this was the perfect time to do that. It’s a good building block for me and hopefully there’s more to come.
On how she is feeling physically after 180 minutes in four days…
You have to look at things in terms of milestones when you recover from a big injury and when I look back to a few weeks ago and I felt a bit unfit and sluggish at times and you realise you’re building and it’s a big tick for me and a big smile on my face for getting this game time, this is a big step in my rehab.
? Another win
? Another three points
? Another clean sheet#ContiCup ? pic.twitter.com/aXxKM6kpRh— Arsenal Women (@ArsenalWFC) October 20, 2019
On Joe playing a strong starting line-up…
This was an opportunity to swap some players around who had had a high load in recent weeks, Kim, Lisa and Katie were on the bench today. We’re very big at looking at everyone’s data and balancing between resting when we can but getting enough minutes so that nobody falls behind. We know it’s a challenge with the Champions League too, but that’s a challenge we want. Joe is big on us living right and looking after ourselves and performing in every game.
On Emma Hayes’ contention that the Conti Cup should be scrapped…
I understand her point about not having a home game for five weeks, they had a big crowd and have to wait to capitalise on it and that’s a big challenge for the league to look at. For me, I want to win trophies and I want to play football games whenever I can, but I agree with her point on the lack of home games.
On having seven days to prepare for a home game against Manchester City…
We were just speaking about finally having some time to get some gym time and some weights in, because we’ve literally just been playing then recovering for the last few weeks. It’s a great time for us to regroup and get everyone back on track. It’s a huge game for us, Man City are one of the best teams in the league and we’ve got to be ready for that, so the week led-in time gives us a great chance to be ready.
A good insight about the build up to fitness for Jordan (and Lia?) after their big injuries & good to see Mitch, Kat & Louise get full 90’s. Bit of a question mark about Viv’s calf knock (not muscle or ligament pull, apparently?). Fingers crossed for next Sunday!
COYG
I had somekind of split personality disorder about this game 🙂
Me: everyone at the Arsenal are well-paid professionals and they know what they are doing.
Also me: why the hell are Viv, Beth, Dvd, Lia, Jordan playing in this game and some of them doing 90 minutes. We have to rest them for ManCity. All of them will play not just the Arsenal games in the next few months but also all the international minutes as well.
Also it’s fun that our best goals this season have come from short corners. So it is possible to do them right.
I do not believe for one minute that any of the percieved first eleven will be rested for the Citeh game next week! Problem is that whilst we have quality in depth we still have a very small squad to compete in four competitions simultaneously. As Joe said in his interview, some of the youth players who normally make up the first team numbers had their own commitments also and even a Gunner cannot be in two places at once! I would like to have seen Viv, DvD and Meado put their feet up for the weekend but resting three… Read more »
Me, too! Especially as we had Filis and Grant on the bench for the midweek game – surely they could have played a part in this match.
Best preparation for the City game next week is we won 4-0 and they lost to United!
That must have hurt.
Despite their good start to the season they are not invincible now without Nikita Parris and Ellen White for different reasons.
….and a straight red for Keira Walsh will further effect their strength one assumes. The absence of Ruby, Mel & Silvana from yesterday’s squad was a bit of a surprise (to me) since Joe did say last week the league cup group stages were an important part of their development and integration into the squad. Unless there are some rules which only allow non-contract youth players into the first team under special circumstances such as last season’s injury crisis when I think up to 7 academy players were involved I’m one league cup group game.
There was post match reaction from Joe on the Arsenal website and he said when asked about the lack of young players in the line-up “Yeah, they had commitments with other games, so we’re trying to balance things out.”
So no complex rules he just did not consider them available for this game.
That I don’t buy. If Joe had wanted the youngster to be available for this game, they would have been available. First team games will always be priority over acadamy games. Same in mens game, same in everythere. It is not reasonable to pull them away from academy games if you are not gonna use them, but if he had wanted to start them and give enough gametime, he could have had them.
Ha ha…..not forgetting we’ve also got the best part of the Houghton – Beattie defensive wall in our ranks!!?
Indeed, she will score goals too when Meado drops the ball onto her head!
I thought it was a rather nifty poach with her right peg?
I’m going to do an article on this in the next week or so, but fundamentally, Joe just isn’t convinced of the merits of resting players. I think he might have rested more had we had a midweek game, but he feels that ten days rest would’ve been too much and they would have lost sharpness. But when you look at it on paper, the minutes are actually evenly spread.
Makes sense and “Joe Knows” his players.
Didn’t stop some of us mere mortals uttering ffs under our breaths when Viv hobbled off with 10 minutes to go, all subs on & the game well and truly won.
I get that this anxiety about resting players is more a supporters thing and we have lot of high quality staff that knows this much better than us. Just at the rate these players are going at the moment most of them will play close to 50 games (with international games) this season, depends on how far we go in the cup competitions. I feel that is a lot. And we are about 2 muscle injuries away from being in position where it is basicly impossible to rotate our first team at all because of our squad size. Joe also… Read more »
I’m not going to argue with Joe, because obviously. However,there is also the positive factor of giving youngsters time so that they don’t leave us. I’ll look forward to reading that article!
But the young players were unavailable!
I rather agree about the Conti Cup–who needs it? Not the big clubs, whose top players are already playing a lot of games between league play, FA Cup, Euro qualifying and Champions League. I can see where the Conti Cup might be appealing to lower-tier teams, I suppose, but I’ve wondered what the point of it is, really.
It does give teams that are not staffed entirely by internationals and don’t qualify for Champions League, which applies to a majority of WSL sides, another chance at a trophy and it also gives Arsenal another go at a quadruple!
If we do not consider it important we can always send out an U18 team like the top men’s teams do for their League Cup but professional sports (wo)men are competitive and want to win and win again.
Historically AWFC have always treated the league cup & the lower status oposition with respect. In its current format as the Continental Cup we’ve appeared in 7 of the 8 finals and won it 5 times (with Mank City the other 3). Joe certainly thinks it’s a worthwhile competition. It was his first trophy win with the Club and although we lost out on penalties to City in last season’s final I remember Leah Williamson saying that the pain of losing gave impetus to the team to go the rest of the season unbeaten to clinch the title. With regard… Read more »