Renée Slegers admitted that “football is unpredictable” in her pre-match press conference ahead of Arsenal’s meeting with Real Madrid at Emirates Stadium on Wednesday, but insisted that “everything is set up for us to perform” and overturn a two-goal deficit from the first leg.
The Gunners were outclassed on a sodden pitch at the Estadio Alfredo di Stefano last week, with Alberto Toril’s Real Madrid able to claim a momentous 2-0 first leg win in the quarter-finals of the UEFA Women’s Champions League – but Slegers is confident that her side “know what we need to do tomorrow” to progress to the final four.
“We’ll try to make the right decisions and we have a lot of quality in the squad, both from a starting and a finishing perspective,” she told journalists at the Sobha Realty Training Centre on Tuesday, adding that “I can visualise in my head how the game should look, but football is unpredictable and that’s the magic about it, I think.”
“In an ideal world, I have a picture in my head of what happens across those 90-100 minutes, but we also have to plan for all possible scenarios. The one thing that I know that we are going to be and the players are going to be is that we’re going to be calm and composed and we have a belief during the whole game that we can do it.”
Arsenal were able to regain confidence at the Emirates Stadium on the weekend with a 4-0 thrashing of Liverpool in the Barclays Women’s Super League, becoming the first side in history to win six consecutive home fixtures in the WSL by four goals or more.
For Slegers, there is no denying that “the Emirates is good for us”.
“The pitch is good and the facilities are good. We can prepare very well to perform. Also, at Boreham Wood when we play there, we can have a lot of fans close to us, it’s an intimate setting.”
“Of course, [the] Emirates is much bigger, and I think that when we’re together with the fans, we’re at our best. We can create something magical and they give us that extra edge. So we really thrive at the Emirates. So everything is set up for us to perform, but then it’s still about ourselves, what we bring to the game tomorrow.”
But while Arsenal’s confidence may have been bolstered by an impressive showing, Real Madrid will head to North London in high spirits too after claiming their first-ever victory over Barcelona.
“I think the whole staff watched it live,” Slegers revealed, “and then we reviewed the game the next morning, but we always do very detailed work on opposition. So, you see those two teams in [Liga F] fighting and it was a good game. I think they both tried to play their game as much as possible, so it was good to see a lot of learnings and of course we saw that Madrid came away with a 3-1 win for the first time in history.”
“But that’s that and that’s them, so it’s about us tomorrow,” she continued, turning her full focus to the second leg of this mammoth UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-final, which gets underway at Emirates Stadium at 20:00 GMT [21:00 CET] on Wednesday, 26 March.