Arsenal Women coach Jonas Eidevall says he and his squad should relish the challenge of the second half of the season. The Gunners brought in Victoria Pelova, Katherine Kuhl and Sabrina D’Angelo during the January transfer window as well as recalling Brazilian teenager Gio from loan at Everton.
However, with Beth Mead and Vivianne Miedema out for the season and a second half of the campaign that includes three games against Manchester City, two against Chelsea, a trip to Manchester United as well as the Champions League quarter-finals, Eidevall is under no illusion that the failure to land another striker in January is a blow for his squad planning.
However, the Arsenal boss accepts the challenge ahead and wants his players to feel the same, “The squad that we have, I have a lot of belief in. I think we have so many quality players and we have so much potential in what we can achieve together.
“We need to focus on that but we need to work together in order to understand that we will have a tighter squad that will need to play a lot of games together and they will need to keep really high standards and be consistent over that time, even if we don’t have that much time to recover between each game.
“That’s a challenge but let’s go for the challenge. Let’s do our very best, that is where our focus needs to be. Then, like Tim rightly pointed out (in response to the our question about whether Arsenal need to review the way they do transfers) let’s look at the summer and look at what things we need to do differently to be successful in the transfer market.
“We can’t change that now, what we need to focus on is what can give us success right now and that is about working together really, really well on this season.”
No point looking at things any other way! Yes, any team would miss Miedema and Mead and ideally we would have got in another striker but we have got lots of exciting attacking talent and we will just do things a different way.