Joe Montemurro was asked about a number of topics following our 6-0 pre-season victory over Tottenham Hotspur on Sunday.
Our head coach fielded questions about Jennifer Beattie’s aerial threat, our depth in midfield, the transfer window and our pre-season as a whole.
Here’s how he answered:
on Jen Beattie’s threat at set-pieces…
Jen has all the tools to be dangerous from set pieces and the first two goals were worked set-pieces today. We looked at areas where we could hurt them and that was one of them. But with players like Louise Quinn, Jen Beattie and some of the midfielders we’ve got, we should be pretty dominant at set-pieces this season.
on how he sees the defensive midfield role with Lia Walti injured…
We don’t usually play with a six or two sixes that sit there and wait anyway, we always rotate and our 10s can drop, in our eights can drop in, so it’s quite fluid. With DvD, Kim and Jill Roord in there at the start it worked very well today. Once Jordan gets her fitness up too we’ll be able to really rotate in those areas, but Lia Walti is not far away either so I am going to have some headaches in the next few weeks.
on the transfer window…
We’re happy. We did a lot of the work early on in the window on purpose to integrate the players as quickly as possible. We know what we need and at the moment we’re happy with the depth of the squad. We know we have lost Dan Carter which is a real miss but we have some really good young players and we’ll give them an opportunity.
on playing two WSL sides in our final pre-season fixtures…
We played West Ham last week and we did it this way on purpose. We probably played Bayern and Wolfsburg too early, if we played them now we think it would be a different game. We’ve had five or six weeks of pre-season now, but we played Bayern with a few days of training and we played Wolfsburg with six days of training. We played Barcelona with the major block of players who were at the World Cup not long back. We knew we were a bit behind in those games, but now we’re really happy with the way things are going and to be honest, we don’t want to peak now. We want a little bit left in the tank and today was a good showcase for where we are and what we still need to do.
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
