Eidevall on our four key principles of play

After a difficult start to our 2023/24 season, we're now unbeaten in each of our last nine fixtures across all competitions, winning eight, with performances improving on a weekly basis. 

Back in October following defeat against Liverpool on the opening day of the season, Jonas Eidevall was asked about the importance of sticking to our key principles of play in difficult moments. 

"In order to navigate your way through a stormy sea, it’s important to be very clear on where you’re going and how you’re going to get there, so you don’t have to start thinking about that when the waves are smashing against the boat," said Eidevall in his pre-Chelsea press conference on Friday morning.

"(When you're in a difficult moment), what happens is that people start to get their own ideas because everyone wants to solve it and no one wants to not be playing well or not having good results, but when people start to go off in different directions, that’s when it starts to harm the team’s performance, even if everyone is doing it with the best intentions. That’s why it’s so important to bring everyone together, to focus around the key principles. I always think the art of coaching is to try and think about what principle at this moment is going to give us the most impact. As a coach, that’s how you get trust from the group because now the next time you pick something the likelihood is that they’re going to think ‘oh this is going to benefit the team as well’, so I think that’s always the art of coaching, to see what principles we’re going to focus most on."

Our head coach was then asked about which key principles he chose to focus on following defeat against Paris FC and Liverpool.

"I can be open with that. We have four key principles which we always look at. When we have the ball, we look at our positioning. When we don’t have the ball, we look at whether we’re compact in the area that we want to be compact in. When we lose the ball, we try to make the pitch small. When we win the ball, we try to make the pitch big. It’s as easy as that and then we need to see which one of these now we are not doing well enough. 

"(At that time), I think we had a fair bit to do with our positioning but also compactness, so those two things were really important for us to address after the first games and working together as a team to make sure that we were compact in the right spaces, but also so that everyone was aware of how we’re positioned and why we’re positioned that way. Then we could get dynamic and start interacting more with the players so that it’s not the same players who have to fill the same positions all the time. We’ve started to play a little more fluid and dynamic in offence."