Arsenal Women head coach Jonas Eidevall spoke to the press after his side began the new WSL season with defeat at home to Liverpool.

Selecting Arsenal’s players and system: “A combination of the players we have available and also a little bit about what formation is best to manage the strengths and weaknesses of the opposition.”

How Liverpool changed their shape and the match became a crossing game: “Especially in the second half. In the first half I think there is a quite good variation of how we were able to go through. I just don’t like the quality that we have in the final third for it, but we generated a lot of good situations that we potentially could have got a better outcome from. In the second half I think we struggled to generate any real momentum because the game very much becomes a stop-start game, it becomes a lot of set pieces and because of the time it takes we always have to play against a set defence, so we were not successful on stacking situations upon each other, and therefore trying to disorganise them and we were not able to create the necessary momentum. That’s a disappointing bit. I think [Matt Beard] was right on the goal that they catch us higher up, but apart from that I don’t think they changed much during the game, I think that was a very similar picture.”

Arsenal’s selection issues: “I selected 20 players to be in the matchday squad. They werre all available to play and we took that upon the strength and the weaknesses of Liverpool.”

How the scheduling of the World Cup and Arsenal’s Champions League games impacted his selection: “I counted on Saturday we made our tenth training session in the last four months with all the players available, without any being away on international team or holiday. Of course that is not great, having four training sessions in ten months with a team. That’s where we’re at, and we need to invest time in relationships. We need to perform better than we did today, and we can’t really use that as an excuse because it is what it is, so we need to understand that every day on the training pitch it counts. Every minute that we play together it counts. Are we playing at the level we want right now? No we’re not, I’m not hiding from that. We need to be better and we need to develop, and we don’t have a lot of time to do that so we need to use our time really well.”

The disappointment of losing to Liverpool, following the Champions League exit: “It’s big, no matter the Champions League exit or not. It’s really disappointing to lose the game at home, especially with having 54,000 fans that turned up and gave us incredible support, it’s really disappointing.”

Alessia Russo’s performance: “I think she worked very hard. I think she was very hard pressed at times- they were really strong centrally. Centrally on the pitch was not where there was a lot of space and time for any player in a red shirt today, so she had to fight hard for all of the inches around her.”

The record WSL crowd and atmosphere at Emirates Stadium: “The only disappointment with that is that we couldn’t reward them with a better performance or a better result. That is my disappointment at the moment. Our basic work with the team all the way to the final whistle was incredible, and I want to thank every one of the fans, I want to say sorry that we didn’t perform better, but please give us more chances, come back, and we will do better.”

On whether the pressure to win is larger in front of a bigger crowd: “There’s no one putting pressure on me to get results than myself. I want to win so badly. Every time. There’s nothing that changes that. No matter how many people are interested. My expectations on myself and my willingness to win is so high and it doesn’t change that. Not at all.”