Changes

A willingness to make early changes has been a hallmark of Renee Slegers’ reign so far. Not only has she been willing to get players like Kim Little and Emily Fox off the pitch to rest their legs (and favourable game states have largely allowed her to do that), Slegers has also shown a willingness to move to Plan B when Plan A has run its course.

I will go into this in detail in this week’s analysis piece on Arseblog News (at time of writing Miedemastuff is just cooking up the graphics for us) but Arsenal’s broad game plan against Crystal Palace was to attack down the right. I think the Gunners identified that Katrine Veje would jump out of the defensive line to engage with Arsenal’s attackers.

Up until the 54th minute, every open play shot that Arsenal created originated, at some stage, from the right hand side. Arsenal aimed to play quick, one touch football with Fox, Maanum, Little, Mead and Williamson bunching up on that side. In the second half, Palace adjusted to this and committed numbers and greater defensive aggression to the right and Arsenal had less success on that side.

Slegers didn’t hang around and Caitlin Foord came on for Frida Maanum in the 56th minute. This meant Mariona moved into a more central role with Foord playing on the left. But Slegers had asked Maanum to drift to the right from the 10 position and made the same ask of Mariona. Slegers made this change because Palace had compressed the space on the right and Mariona is the best placed player to deal with that scenario.

Foord moved to the left wing and instead of having Mariona playing slightly inside and McCabe on the overlap, Arsenal moved to a back three with Catley as a wide centre-half on the left. McCabe inverted into midfield and Foord, a more natural player to hold the width, stayed wide on the left.

In essence, the game plan didn’t change much. Slegers simply shuffled the pack and put players into slightly different roles to adapt to the situation. Within a few minutes of the substitution, McCabe drove from a central position, released Foord on the left and her shot was parried to Russo to make it 2-0. A couple of minutes later, Mariona played a quick around the corner pass on the right to tee up the move that culminated in Mead’s goal.

But key to Slegers’ willingness to adapt are three core players who enable that shuffling of pieces on the chess board. The first is Katie McCabe, who has now started 25 Arsenal games in a row and is the only player to start all 21 of the Gunners’ games this season. 

McCabe has been considered a versatile player because of her ability to play in different positions. Now her versatility is a means of her interpreting the full-back position differently according to game state. We have seen Slegers push McCabe right up as a de facto left winger so that Mariona can move into the left half space.

And we have also seen McCabe move into a more inverted left-back role. This is aided and abetted by having Steph Catley at centre-half. Her ability to sweep up in the left channel and operate as a wide left centre-half enables McCabe to either play as a left winger or as a central midfielder and to help Arsenal play in more of a back three.

The third significant pillar of this adaptability is Mariona Caldentey. Nominally she will usually start on the left but, in reality, will operate in the left half space. Arsenal have also used her on the right, as a number 10 and in the midfield double pivot- the last of which was rather forced by injuries.

Asked by Jamie Spangher about Mariona’s qualities after the Crystal Palace game, Slegers said, ‘She is very intense. She does lose the ball sometimes because she is risk taking, which we want because we want intent but she is so good in the counter pressure as well, she always wins ball back immediately. She is very effective with her passes and her runs… we can use her in different positions depending on what we need in a game or how the game starts and how we need to finish.’

Slegers has great depth on the bench to call upon, Lia Walti, Rosa Kafaji and Caitlin Foord all came on on Sunday and Stina Blackstenius and Lina Hurtig were not in the squad. But it’s the adaptability of that left sided trio, Mariona, McCabe and Catley who have been truly key to Slegers’ willingness to make in-game changes.