Injuries to some of the finest players in the women’s game have not stopped Arsenal from sitting in third in the WSL and reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League.

Jonas Eidevall reflected on two factors in Arsenal’s tactical developments in the current season, including the decision to work on playing in a back five back in January.

“One of the most important things is to, A, find opportunities for when you can develop things, so I think one of the most important things for us this season was in January when the Brighton game got called off I think we had a quite good time between games, and we used that time in saying ok, let’s train a different formation, let’s play with a back three. We’re not going to use it the next game coming after but we need to as a group of players, we need to understand these are the main principles, these are the reasons why we would like to play with another formation so we can change between games or in games and so on. I think us investing that time has now given us a point where we can change formations much more easy, so that’s one thing.

Some of the most important work took place all the way back in pre-season however, when the foundations were laid during a trip to Germany. 

“Second thing is that I think you need to get other people’s input if you’re going to get new ideas. I don’t believe that I am just going to go for a walk on my own and generate all these great ideas in my head, so when we went to Germany in pre season on the Adidas training camp there, they had a really really good setup there in the technical office with a big table where everyone could fit around and we could sit there and generate new ideas for training, so when we did our new building here for the women’s team we changed the technical office straight away and said let’s make this more like the Adidas technical room was there. 

“That big table, we have generated a lot of ideas from the whole technical team, listening to everyone's ideas, and a lot of times I think it has been the combination of ideas that has been successful. It hasn’t been my original idea, not anyone else’s original idea as well, but when we start to combine ideas, the principles of those ideas, together we find some really really good solutions and that has been really really nice, working with a group of people that have that input, and we can have that dialogue and that has been new to me. It’s not how I usually have worked out solutions in football, so that has been very nice and it also helps a lot when you build that feeling that we are in this together, and it’s not just one person alone.”

Arsenal travel to rivals Chelsea in a huge game at the top of the WSL table, with Eidevall sticking to his beliefs about taking it one game at a time, even with just two matches left. “Like I said before we play one game at a time. We know we can focus on that, it gives us our best chance to finish as high as possible. We manage that very well and it’s no different for this game. We play against a very very strong Chelsea side and we know we need to be at our very best and give maybe our best performance of the season in order to get the result, so we need to do our very best in order to do it.”