Two weeks on from lifting the FA Women’s Continental Tyres League Cup trophy, Jonas Eidevall’s Gunners are back in action for the visit of Bristol City at Meadow Park on Sunday evening.
While the Barclays Women’s Super League table has us 31 points ahead of last season’s FA Women’s Championship winners, the Robins, who are bottom of the WSL, are still capable of staying up in the topflight.
Seven points behind 11th-placed West Ham United but with a game in hand and five matches still to play, Bristol could provide a tough test in this weekend’s 6.45pm kick-off.
Asked how we will approach the game, Jonas said: “With 100%. I think they have been a very, very competitive side. They ask a lot of different tactical questions for you as a side.
“They obviously have had a long time to prep for this game. I think it might be three weeks now without a game, so we need to take that into consideration as well. We know we need to play at our very best in order to be able to win the game.
“They also have players returning back here that have been away with injuries, they’ve had three weeks here now to work together as a team. So I go in there with the most respect for the opponent and our performance needs to be really good.”
We’re third in the WSL and can close the gap to leaders Manchester City with a win against Bristol, so Jonas and the team will be taking this fixture as seriously as any other game in the calendar.
“I’ve made that comparison before with a plane crashing and that you need to check all systems and you need to go through all protocols in order to make sure that something is not failing that makes the plane crash,” he explained. “It's the same when we play a football game, I can't tell you beforehand which run is going to be the important one to win the game or what pass or what action. Therefore you need to treat everyone with 100% and it's the same with all the games that you're playing competitively.
“I never have the mindset of thinking about games that are easier or harder. It's a competitive game, it's the next one, it requires 100%. And I think when we talk about being a more consistent team, these are the games that we need to win and we need to apply ourselves 100%. If there's something I've learned here, coming into the end of my third season, is that the league has been lost in games where others from the outside have thought that we were going to win beforehand. And we haven't been able to do that, and that tells me something about, okay, we need as a team to be able to apply ourselves even better, coming in with an even better performance in these games for this last block here of the season for the future, if we're going to give ourselves the best chance of winning."
Click here to read every word of Jonas’ pre-Bristol City press conference.
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