Renee Slegers reacts to 4-3 pre season defeat to Spurs

Arsenal were beaten 4-3 by Tottenham in a pre-season friendly at Boreham Wood on Saturday. Victoria Pelova, an own goal and Caitlin Foord were on the score sheet for the Gunners. Renee Slegers spoke to the press post-match, the first three questions are from Arseblog News.

On Blackstenius, Maanum and van Domselaar not being in the squad…
So there’s different reasons for all individual cases. Preseason is about building all players in the right way and it doesn’t mean they’re not available or injured. It’s just different players we want to see and we manage the players in different ways, but they’ve all looked great since they come back.

On the game being heavily transitional and whether that was down to it being pre-season or a repeat of issues from last season…
There is such a wider context to preseason games because there’s so many other things that we need to build and for that reason, players playing out of position, there’s new relationships, players have just come back from the Euros and started building, people that played their first minutes today. We have academy players that we want to see and they had minutes. There are actually quite some positives there.

But no, there’s a wider context, so we don’t focus on the result is it doesn’t define us and it’s not something that we are too worried about, but we do look at performances and we want to learn. So it was good this game happened. We don’t like losing at all, but we need to put it into a bigger perspective and there’s so many learnings for us here. I think they came out and did something new compared to last season, the very physical press very aggressively and more and more teams do that in the league and so hence why the game becomes more transitional. So that’s something new that’s happening in the league that we need to manage. So in that sense, I’m happy that we got the game today, we got a real big test.

On Steph Catley being captain and whether there have been changes in the leadership group for the season…
No, not before everything is clear and communicated internally, but all I can say here is that we have a lot of leaders in the team and so it’s a luxury position and part of my philosophy is to empower as many people as possible.

On the motivation of starting the campaign as European champions…
It’s definitely motivating because that’s what you do at all for, you want to progress and make things better and make things sustainable and create consistency in order to win things and that’s our business and that’s what we love. So it definitely creates motivation, it does. But it also creates, you know that winning is hard and the margins are small, so a lot of things have to go really well for you to win. And everything that we have within our control, we’re going to try to control.

On whether she plans to add to the squad before the season starts…
I’m happy with the squad and the window is still open, so we’re always looking to strengthen, but we’re really happy with the players that are here what you see is players getting first minutes back, of course. Codi has been out for a long time she’s building a lot of her first minutes. We wanted to see an academy player at the end of the game. New players coming in and learning about the style of play. So there is a lot of context to everything, but I’m happy.

On Beth Mead starting and whether that means she will not leave this summer…
Beth is an Arsenal player, so we’re building with what we have.

On Leah Williamson missing the start of the season…
Leah has been very important for us last season. She’s really good in possession with her progressive passing. She’s very intelligent out of possession as well. She’s a leader. So she’s been important for us, but we have a really big squad and a lot of good players. So when this happens, sometimes that’s part of football, that players aren’t available, then we have the next one to come in.

On the positives from today…
We see players in new positions, we’ve seen academy players today and I was happy with Sophie Harwood, for example. I think what we did out of possession today was very challenging because, again, we have players that play in different positions that they normally don’t play in. We have the first players coming back now after the summer and they are put together out on the pitch with new relationships and the way Tottenham played was challenging from a problem solving perspective, so that’s a part of the game that I’m really happy with.

On her memories of Lisbon in May…
I think one big moment for me was 10, 15 minutes into the game, because of course we tried to visualise, how is this game gonna look? And is our game plan going to work? And after 10, 15 minutes, I felt like, okay, things are working and the belief started growing, I think on our end, on the sideline, but also with the players on the pitch, that was a special moment.

28.Borbe; 2.Fox (44.Harwood ‘73), 3.Wubben-Moy (5.L.Codina HT), 7.Catley(c), 11.McCabe (24.Hinds HT); 32.Cooney-Cross, 8.Mariona (26.Reid ‘62); 9.Mead (19.Foord ‘62), 21.Pelova (10.Little ‘73), 18.Kelly (15.Smith HT); 23.Russo (22.Nighswonger ‘62).

Unused: 1.Zinsberger 36.Wellesley-Smith 37.Lia

The post Renee Slegers reacts to 4-3 pre season defeat to Spurs appeared first on Arseblog News - the Arsenal news site.