Every word from Jonas' pre-Aston Villa presser

We head to Villa Park in Women's Super League action this weekend, and ahead of the game Jonas Eidevall tackled questions about it at the Sobha Realty Training Centre.

He was asked about bouncing back from our loss at Chelsea, our Australia post-season trip and whether our recent win against Villa would have any bearing on this fixture, as well as other topics.

Here is everything he had to say:

on how the mood has been since last week’s defeat:
Like I said after the game, I think our performance was bad, the result was bad. We were obviously very disappointed with that - I don't think that was a true reflection of where we are as a team and where our standards are. When you have a performance like that, everyone is disappointed and we needed to take the first days after that to connect, reflect and learn what we need to learn from that game, and after that you need to look forward. You need to remember who you are, what you want to achieve when you are playing and you need to put your focus on that. You need to shift the mindset and start looking forward - once you learn what you need to learn, you start looking forward and that's what we have been doing.

on whether he’s seen extra determination in training this week:
Of course. The motivation to show another side of us than we did last Friday is a big part of that. I don't think our effort level was good enough on Friday and that hurts. Playing good football is more than only having a good effort so it's really important to find the enjoyment when you play. I think sometimes when you lose and you try to bounce back after a poor performance, you're all about the hard work and hard skills and you tend to forget about the soft skills and the enjoyment that is so important. If you want to play great football, you need to have enjoyment as well, and have players that can feel free and don't need to overthink moments. I think that's been a really important element to bring into our practice this week.

on the mental toll of being nine points behind the leaders come kick-off:
I hope not because what we need to be focused on is what we need to play against Aston Villa and that's where 100 per cent of our focus needs to be. If our focus starts to drift all over the place then I think that affects performance and that's not good, so that's part of the challenge that we have - to keep one game at a time in focus. That's what we need to do for now and for the rest of the season.

on whether he has given up on the title:
I'm a firm believer that you need to do your absolute best in every game you play and you need to prepare for that as good as possible. When the league table is finished, you will end up with your position so that's what we need to put our focus onto. We have important games coming up and we need to play one game at a time.

on whether the 4-0 win over Villa bares any significance on this game:
I think this season taught us that you will not get anything for free based on your past performances. It's a very competitive league and Villa are a very competitive team and they will be a strong opponent against us and we need to be on our very best behaviour on Sunday.

on the players focusing more on the Conti Cup final next week:
That's another example of an external focus that can take away focus and priority for the game this week. We can't allow that to happen, we need to stay one game at a time to focus on and now it’s Aston Villa and that’s where we will put our focus.

on lessons being learned from the socks issue at Chelsea:
It’s not exactly under my department and responsibilities to do that but we all acknowledge that it’s not good enough, of course we should be able to have the right kit on. That's not an issue that we're trying to shy away from. What's important for me to know is that we have things put in place so it's not going to happen again, and that's the most important thing in any organisation when you make a mistake is to make sure you learn from it and that it's not happening again. That I've been assured of and therefore I don't spend more energy on it.

on team news:
We have two more training sessions here today and tomorrow. We've been training well so we have a good competition in the squad available for selection.

on when he looks to review and reflect on the season:
I think that’s a very good question to begin with. I think it’s one of the challenges that you have all the time because I understand that when the performances and the results are not good, as supporters you tend to go to a dark place. As a coach, you do the same and as a player you do the same. I think it's a very human thing for the mind to drift like that because you’re naturally very disappointed about what is happening and you’re in something that you are investing a lot of your emotions into, and then you have a situation where you have a long time between the games which can allow your mind to drift for a longer time than usual before you need to prepare for the next opponent. 

I think it's important to try and stay as constructive as possible. Now I'm just talking from my side to do that and always be very mindful. To say what can we control in this, am I putting my focus on what we can control, what are the things we need to do short-term and what are the things we need to do long-term as well. That evaluation process in changing things long-term, I don't believe that you just put your head in the sand and continue to work during the season and have this big review process after the season and be like what was good, what was going wrong and what do we potentially need to change for the next season. 

I think that's a continuous thing. I would compare it to a plane crash - what usually leads to the plane crashing might be a very, very tiny detail but you need to go through all the processes and all the details in order to find out there was an oil leakage here for example, and how do we fix that for next time. Usually the things that you need to oversee and you need to fix do not necessarily need to be the biggest ones, it might be one detail, but the effect that detail has is a big one. That's a responsibility for me and the organisation to find that. 

I think our season so far has been a very inconsistent one. I think where you can see progress has been at individual games and individual periods of the season where I think we have shown that we are a very very capable football team playing some really good football and being able to compete and beat all our competitors, but what we haven't been able to show is that we are team that is doing that consistently and perform at that standard consistently and that's disappointing. 

That's really where I hope we can get with this team. Are there some reasons why we're not there? Yeah of course, there are some reasons for it. I think we're in a season where we are still changing a lot with players coming in and building new relationships in the team and I think that's part of it where we’re finding some inconsistencies, but it's not the whole truth of it. It's not like you see other teams always having the perfect selection of players to choose from and that they can't keep consistency in their performances, so I think that's a part where we need to improve and we need to do that better, but I'm not waiting till the end of the season to try and find reasons why we have been inconsistent. That's an ongoing process and we need to work with that.

on playing out in Melbourne at the end of the season:
Let’s acknowledge the great thing that it’s very commercially viable for us to do a post-season trip like this. That shows the club’s investment but also the popularity that the team has, not only in the UK but across the globe. I think when you see Australia as a football continent - I was lucky enough to experience the World Cup there last summer, and you can see what enthusiasm and interest women's football has in Australia. It's great that we can continue to build and this is another opportunity to do that both for women’s football in genera,l but also Arsenal as a specific club.

Once the decision was taken that we were going, it is now about making the most out of that opportunity. That means that for some players it will be the right thing to go, and for some players it will not be the right thing to go if we talk about it from a loading and welfare perspective. We need to make good and deliberate decisions on that. It's going to be a great opportunity for us to see our first-year professionals get experience of travelling and playing with us, and I think we really need to grab that opportunity as well to invest time in these players, in combination with needing to have a strong team there going out to showcase Arsenal to fans in another continent and the way we want to play football. It’s really about finding that balance and I’m in high hopes that we are able to do that. 

on whether Villa are likely to adjust their formation:
You can have an educated guess. In the Conti Cup semi-final they played a back four in the first half, they played a back three in the second half, and they were consistent playing that against Everton. How will they start? How will they finish against us? I think it's probably likely that they will play a back three, but we need to prep for both. And I think that's when you want to be consistent as a team and you need to consistently perform as a team.

It comes back to situations, situations, situations. What I mean by that is whatever the situation, do we have a clear idea and picture of how we solve that? They play a back three, we know how to play against that. They’re a back four, we know how to play against that. They’re a low block, we know how to play against that. They’re pressing high, we know how to play against that. It comes back to that and that team maturity. Do we, as a team and a collective, have a clear idea of what we're playing against, and how we play against that? If you have that, then you perform consistently, but the moment you don't have the same idea about the situation, that's when inconsistencies start coming into the performances. 

And that's where it comes into that you're not mature enough as a team to be consistent. That's why this game is good from a challenge perspective, because it's a team that can play with many different formations, so, it really highlights for us how mature we are as a team to be able to deal with it.

on the player workload and playing in Melbourne post-season:
The reason why we're having activity in that period of the year is because of the calendar. We play our last competitive game on May 17 and the normal thing would have been to go on holiday after that, because our competitive season is done. But then there is an international period of fixtures that I think starts on May 27, where they are playing competitive games. So, it was a clear wish from both the players and association teams to say can we not go on holiday in that period to help the players prepare for those international fixtures. So that was the first decision for us to make. 

After that now different opportunities have come up during that period. But this was never a case of where the players could be off, because of the international fixtures. If there wouldn't have been international fixtures, I think the decision might have been very different in order to plan our training and matches and so on. But difficulties lie there, and then you see from a calendar perspective that they play during the end of May, beginning of June. Now after that, we will not have any training sessions. 

But the national team players I think have another camp in the second week of July. We won't have any training here, because at some point, we need to give the players time off. But they need to be prepped to play in qualifiers again in July, and now that comes into the association. That's a very, very complicated situation. When you start looking at it from the players' perspective, when are they going to have time off? They definitely need to raise that with all the relevant stakeholders. I don't think that's right. 

I don't think the summer is rightly planned from the players' perspective in order to be able for them to switch off and get time off for it, but the reason why we are having activity after our last game in the season is because of the calendar and because of the request from the players and association to be able to train them to prepare for that international period coming up.

on climate concerns travelling to Australia:
I think we're part of a lot of people on the planet who care about the planet, and we understand that that's a really important question for the future of humanity. I think as always, when we speak about climate pictures, it's about the holistic picture. We need to zoom out and it's the big collective efforts that will make a big difference in these matters. 

on how playing in major stadiums across the league helps the development of the women’s game:
I think it’s definitely the right development in doing that. I think what we've been doing so well at Arsenal, getting more games played at Emirates and getting better and bigger attendances, it's really important, but in a league, we can't do it ourselves. We need many clubs doing it, so seeing Chelsea doing it at Stamford Bridge, and seeing Villa doing it this weekend, that all plays into the journey that I think we will want to go on as a league. I think it's absolutely the right direction to go.