Every word of Jonas' pre-Everton press conference

Jonas Eidevall has held his pre-Everton press conference at Sobha Realty Training Centre, ahead of Sunday's trip to Merseyside. 

Our head coach was quizzed on team news, how Caitlin Foord's role has evolved and his assessment of the season as a whole.  

Here's everything he had to say:

On team news….

No fresh concerns. Players are able to come back. I think we're in a positive trend since the Bristol game, so we were able to welcome back players to the Leicester game. And we have a few more coming back in for contention. So that's good, but no players dropping out. 

On setting his sights higher than the Champions League…

Like I said, after the game, I think it's when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see a European club. It is really important for us to be in Europe, both to compete, but also to get experience there. 

So that is an important goal every season we win and play. But it doesn't satisfy anything else than just giving us a good foundation for next season. So, now we still need to make the most out of the three games that we have left. 

On what the target is for the next three matches…

Top performances, that's what we can control. We need to go game by game; we need to build on the performances that we have played before. And if we can treat each one of these games individually and have good performances, then I'm sure we will have good results as well. And then we can look ourselves in the mirror and say we did everything we could.

On the Opta supercomputer giving his team a zero per cent chance of winning the league…

Like I said before, it's about for us to focus on what we can control. The Opta supercomputer is definitely one of the things that we can't control. So, they can make their calculations, but we have to focus on our performances.

on Wubben-Moy and Cooney-Cross’s availability:

Both are progressing positively. They have two more training sessions but they’re very much two players that I’m talking about here being able to be in contention for the squad here on Sunday.

on Foord’s role in the team and how that affects his structure:

Being structured and being static is not the same thing but it sometimes is easiest, if you want structure, to be static, because if no-one moves then everything can be the way you want it. Very seldom is that associated with good football. 

When we tend to describe successful teams we use words like dynamic, fluid, and creative, so now how do you get structure with that? For me, that’s the principles, so if the principles provide us with the structure and the principles make sure that we’re balanced in offence and defence, then we can have fluidity in the way that we move.

The better we understand the principles and understand how your position might impact someone else, the better you will be able to play with dynamic and fluidity, but that requires some team maturity and I think we are at a much better place right now as a team in order to be able to adapt and to express ourselves that way. 

I think some of our attacking play against Leicester was a great example of that, how other players are able to take up positions that someone else is leaving that provides the team’s need for balance and structure while the player can exploit the space that she sees in the moment. I don’t think that’s only for me, I think it’s most football coaches that want to come to that point with a team and I think we have developed in that area. 

On our improved performances since the winter break… 

I think when we see the season as a whole and we’ve been saying that we needed to be more consistent in order to have more points than we have right now. That’s one part, but it’s also true during the season that we’ve seen a lot of progression and development in the way that we’ve been playing.

So then you can also argue that our starting point this season is too low and that’s of course for different reasons. We had very little time going into the season when it started and we had new players coming in, so we didn’t start with the same core group of players that finished the last season and so on.

I think that’s also something that we need to fix for next season to come in at a higher starting point, because we can see that we can develop and progress as a team during the season, which is really important, but it’s also important to start at a higher level than we have done this year.

On whether he thinks it’s a been successful season, given the circumstances…

Like I said before, I think it makes more sense to summarise the season after we've played all the last three games. But speaking generally, we want to win the league. We are Arsenal, we want to win all competitions that we are in. 

We wanted to qualify for the group stage and go far in Europe, which we didn't do. We would have loved to go to an FA Cup final. So there are definitely things that we can do better and we know that. As I've said before, consistency is a big thing for us in order to improve.

To start on a better level than we did this season. It's also an important thing for us to correct and make better for next season and also things that are entirely within our own control. We need to reflect and make that better.