The Emirates Stadium plays host to table-toppers Chelsea on Sunday, as Arsenal look to go level on points with the defending Barclays Women’s Super League champions.
The Gunners are expecting a near-full house as they look to overcome their fiercest rivals in North London.
Less than 4,000 tickets remain for the match and Arsenal boss Jonas Eidevall has hailed the tremendous growth of the fanbase in N7.
“We have to push and make it a sell-out,” Eidevall said when speaking in the pre-match press conference. “The atmosphere that has been created by the supporter groups, that’s what drives us to get to the stage that we’re at. A few years ago, these conversations would’ve been visions, dreams and goals.
“When I came two-and-a-half seasons ago, there were less than 10,000 people when we played Chelsea at the Emirates and now, we’re talking about a sell-out; that’s tremendous growth.”
Eidevall understands that his side will need to be at their very best to overcome Emma Hayes’ Blues in what some fans are labelling as a ‘must not lose game’. A Chelsea victory would see them hold a six-point lead at the top of the Barclays Women’s Super League table with a significantly superior goal difference.
He said “You always need to focus on the performance and then equal that to the result. We need to focus on playing good football and playing well as a team, especially coming back from an international break where players have been away. We need to connect and find our principles.
“It’s so important to bring everyone together and focus on the principles and I always think the art of coaching is thinking what principle is going to give us the most impact in the situation.
“We have four core principles; when we have the ball, we look at our positioning and when we don’t have the ball, we look to be compact in the area necessary. When we lose the ball, we try and make the pitch small and when we win the ball, we try and make the pitch big.”
Chelsea are statistically Arsenal’s toughest opponents in the Barclays Women’s Super League and Eidevall has recently alluded to the fact that he thinks this is the strongest Blues side that he has seen since arriving in England.
“They have a really good dynamic on the pitch, they have developed really well in the way that they sustain attacks and have many different ways in which they can score goals,” Eidevall said.
“I think we saw a team that was more dependent on a few individual players two-and-a-half seasons ago, but you see the number of line-ups they’ve been playing so far this season and still having high consistency in their performances which is really impressive.”
Arsenal’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture against Chelsea kicks-off at 12.30pm on Sunday afternoon. The last available tickets can be purchased by clicking here.
About The Author
