Brighton 0 Arsenal 1: Baum for the reload
This season I am going to attempt to come up with a short same day ‘take’ or colour piece from the game for the site. Here is the first installment.
Arsenal drew six WSL games last season and only lost once. They had the best defensive record and the best underlying numbers in the WSL by a distance. They are well organised and difficult to score against, generally speaking. But in too many games they lacked the cutting edge to separate from teams on the score board.
In few fixtures last season was that more evident than this one, Brighton away. They managed 17 shots at the Broadfield Stadium to Brighton’s six. Only five were on target and Renee Slegers’ side were held to a 1-1 draw which ended their title hopes. On that occasion, Arseblog News asked Slegers about a sixth draw of the campaign.
‘It’s typical,’ she said in a rare moment of public lament. ‘If you look at this season so far, only one defeat in the league and that was away against City who win the league. It’s not a bad record, but we have to get all these other games over the line, so definitely part of the review- there will be a big end of season review because we always do that.’
Slegers has looked to the transfer market and signed Reuteler, Cerci and Baum. Two of those players did not make the matchday squad today. But Lisa Baum started. The 19-year-old has some of the stardust that the Gunners have been looking for to turn some of those draws into victories and that was the difference in Crawley today. Baum took the ball in the Brighton half, had little support, so she opted to beat two defenders and crack the ball in off the bar. Three points.
Asked by The Gooner’s Freddy Cardie whether she expected Baum to be a starter so quickly, Slegers answered, ‘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… 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.’
Of course the Gunners signed Olivia Smith last summer and she has a lot of the same bombastic qualities, as she showed on her own full debut last season against London City Lionesses. In Alessia Russo, Arsenal have a striker who is an outstanding footballer and one of the Gunners’ key players. But she isn’t a consistent match winner in the way that Sam Kerr was or Bunny Shaw is.
So Arsenal are building more of those individualistic qualities around her and Russo, Blackstenius, Baum, Smith et al together all have match winning qualities. But Russo and Stina need to have chances created for them by and large. Smith and Baum have the ability to make their own chances.
We saw that today in Lisa Baum. It is no mean feat that she made the matchday squad, let alone started and it speaks to how much she has impressed in pre-season. She was given a slightly different role on the left wing too. She is a young player who will have ups and downs yet and the league will know more about her and pay her more attention soon enough. But Arsenal came into the season needing a little more stardust in the final third and that was what won them the game today.
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