Jonas Eidevall revealed that Emily Fox’s adaptability to play various ways at full-back was a major reason why he opted to bring her to Arsenal.
The 25-year-old right-back joined us this week from North Carolina Courage, and the 39-time capped USA international has already impressed her new manager with her displays in training.
And when asked in his pre-Watford press conference as to why he pushed to bring her to north London, Jonas was swift to reel off a long list of strengths that he’s looking to exploit over the coming months.
“I’m really excited to see what she can do here in the team,” he said. “I think she has a lot of attributes that make her a very strong full-back for us - she's good on the ball, she's comfortable with both her right and left foot, she can play wide and she can play inside the pitch.
“She has an explosiveness that comes in as a real key strength both to handle one v one situations, but also transition moments in the game. As always, when you’re coming into a new team there’s going to be a period of adaptation, but I think so far she has settled in very well.”
The boss is hoping that Emily’s acquisition will give us a new dimension in defence and attack, as she is capable of playing various roles within the full-back position.
With a new weapon at his disposal, Jonas can’t wait to see what she can do over the coming weeks and months as we compete for trophies on three fronts, starting with this weekend’s FA Cup tie against Watford at Meadow Park.
Reflecting on what he hopes Emily can add to our style of play, he added: “It's very easy to become static in the way that you play if your full-backs can only be wide. That puts a lot of limitations on the way that you can position and the way that you can allow your midfielders to move, so in order for us to try and create as much fluidity as possible in attack, having full-backs that are able to play both wide and on the inside is a fundamental part of that.
“I think we have three natural full-backs here now and each one can do that a little bit in their own ways. Steph, Katie and Emily are comfortable doing that so I think that's a very good situation for us.”
Jonas also revealed he did plenty of due diligence on Emily before deciding to bring her in, as he does with all players to make sure they have the right personality to dovetail with our current crop.
However he didn’t have to go too far for a ringing endorsement, as Alessia Russo and Lotte Wubben-Moy are former Carolina Tar Heels teammates of Fox. He admitted it was a no-brainer to seek them out for their opinions.
“The way we try to recruit is that we're not only recruiting football players, first and foremost we are recruiting people into our environment,” he said.
“When we see the football qualities we spend time speaking to former teammates, coaches, national team coaches and other people who might have worked with the players to try and get as complete a picture as possible, so we know that it's a good person coming into our group. Lotte and Alessia knew a lot about Emily beforehand so of course we spoke to them as well.”
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