Arsenal head coach Jonas Eidevall says that latest opponents Leicester City are performing very well defensively and that his side will need to be good on the ball this weekend.
The Gunners travel to The King Power Stadium to face The Foxes on Sunday afternoon.
When speaking in the pre-match press conference, Eidevall said that Leicester City are a strong side from a defensive point of view and that they are performing better than their league position suggests in their own third of the pitch.
“What I have seen from Leicester before was a very, very organised and structured team who are very hard working,” Eidevall said. “When we look at underlying numbers, it’s one of the best defensive teams in the whole league.
“We’ve seen that in the recent games against Manchester United and Reading that they are a very hard team to break down. We’re prepared to have to be very good on the ball to be able to create enough scoring opportunities to win.”
Leicester City sacked manager Lydia Bedford yesterday and have moved their Director of Football – Women’s and Girls, Willie Kirk, into the hotseat. The move will see The Foxes go into their latest match in a more unpredictable format but Eidevall believes that his players will be ready for the test.
He said “I think one of the most underrated things when you speak about a team sport like football is the concept of team maturity. Team maturity is how many different situations can you deal with as a team, and you need to have time together to build that experience, but you also, of course, have to be effective with the time.
“For us, we’re building that all the time; all the experience that we have either in games or what we try to recreate in training, it goes towards games like this. We can’t say what we are going to expect, so we have to trust the team maturity here to say ‘how many different situations and formations can we deal with?’ and hopefully that’s enough but we need to be good.”
Arsenal’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture at Leicester City kicks-off at 2pm on Sunday afternoon.