Renee Slegers reacts to 1-0 victory over Brighton
Arsenal kicked off their WSL season with a hard fought 1-0 away win at Brighton thanks to Lisa Baum’s early goal. Renee Slegers spoke to the press post-match, the first two questions are from Arseblog News.
On Lisa Baum winning the game with a piece of individual quality…
I have to look at what qualities we need and who has been performing and if I look at Lisa, yes, she’s 19 years old, but the way she presents herself, she’s so mature, she’s so calm, so composed, such a good understanding of the game. Works extremely hard in training and actually off the pitch as well very engaged in meetings. And she’s so invested and she’s had a really good preseason and we felt she was ready to start. This is the WSL opener Brighton away, so it’s a really difficult situation and not the easiest scenario to make your debut. So if you look at how she presents herself on the pitch, what she does, how calm she is, and that she has that brilliant moment in front of our fans, it’s very well deserved. So I’m really happy with that, we have a lot of competition on all positions. You see that Lisa and Olivia have done their job and then Foord and Chloe come on in the wide position and do a really important job for us as well. We are really happy with and for Lisa.
On how Georgia Stanway is changing Arsenal’s build up play…
She brings something different to our team, which we wanted. I think we we pride ourselves on progressing the ball through the lines with short pass combinations, but we also need something different. So we become more unpredictable for the opposition and I think you’ve seen it today that Georgia has, of course, the quality of of playing bigger and looks bigger so that brings a different dynamic to our midfield. It also inspires other players to look for similar things. I think we just the next step is for us to balance that really well because today we wanted to go in behind Brighton when they had a high line and we had a lot of speed up top, we just have to balance when we do what.
On whether she expected Lisa Baum to acclimatise so quickly…
It’s always hard to see what it will look like when a player comes to us and the way we play because, of course, when she played for Leipzig, it was very transitional. I never saw her live. I only saw her on video but I was convinced that she would make it for us even with her age. I didn’t know how it was gonna look, if she was gonna be able to be a starter, if she was gonna go and build her minutes coming on. We spoke before she signed and that was of course a big topic that we spoke about because she’s a young player. She needs her minutes on the pitch to develop. We spoke about that and I never guarantee anything. I never promise anything, but I said, I think you can get that when you come to Arsenal. But her starting in the opener in the WSL and doing this. No, I don’t think that’s what I was hoping for romanticising, but it really happened. I’m so happy and she should be really proud of herself.
On having to leave Reuteler and Cerci out of the squad…
It hurts and those decisions it’s really small margins about what you need in a game. It’s the worst. I enjoy a lot of parts of the Job. It’s the best job. But that that part is really hard, but no one has to feel sorry for me. That’s part of the role and it’s not about me anyway. We have to just make sure that we keep the squad together because there will be moments for every player in the squad to be important and contribute.
On Misa Rodriguez making important saves…
She was really important with that early save. She’s been really good. We have top goalkeepers in our squad now. I think the competition in the squad is just through the roof in all positions. Misa and Anneke have been both have been doing really well in preseason so that was also like such a close margin, looking at what we need but then Misa played for us today for a couple of reasons and she performed really well. She did everything we wanted her to do. She keeps a clean sheet. She was important in that moment, so I’m really happy for Misa.
On what she learned from the performance…
There’s much more to come. We need to do more. We can do more. But what I learned is it’s Brighton away first game of the season. It will be difficult. It will be difficult moments in the season and then it’s about how we respond to those moments and how we then get wins over the line, so that’s something that was my biggest positive learning from the day. I think then if you look at it more from a football perspective, tactically, there’s things that we’re gonna look at- what do we do with the moments when we have longer spells of possession? How can we create? We do want to go fast when there’s moments when there’s space how can we be even more clinical and make good decisions when we want to dictate tempo in what direction? And probably gave them some time on the ball and we had to work quite a lot out of possession so how can we how can we do that even better to minimise their time on the ball? Because they like it, they want to be on the ball and minimise chances. So they are all football things that we’re gonna look at, but the main positive is that we get to win today.
16.Misa; 2.Fox, 6.Williamson, 7.Catley, 22.Batlle (31.Holmberg ‘88); 4.Stanway, 10.Little(c), 8.Mariona (25.Blackstenius ‘71); 19.Baum (9.Foord ‘62), 11.Smith (18.Kelly ‘62); 23.Russo (12.L.Maanum ‘88)
Subs: 3.Wubben-Moy, 24.Hinds, 28.Borbe, 32.Cooney-Cross
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