Morning all, welcome to a new week.
Let’s start with Arsenal Women notching their first victory of the season so far, leaving it very, very late to beat Aston Villa 2-1. First, Katie McCabe did this, then Alessia Russo fired home a winner to take all three points. A nice strike, but I’m not sure the Villa keeper will have slept well last night.
Katie said:
We played right til the very end and I think it shows the mentality in this team. The girls coming off the bench and making the impact they did, and you know what, 35,000 fans here to cheer us on at the Emirates was unbelievable, so we’re just delighted to get the win for them today.
The winning goal came from a Beth Mead pass, making her comeback from the ACL injury last season, and afterwards Jonas Eidevall said of her involvement in that goal:
Beth Mead is extremely intuitive in those moments. She comes onto the pitch and sometimes you think ‘will she get that straight away?’ And sometimes you don’t, but she does because she is Beth Mead.
She has had a really difficult year, being injured, her mum passing away. It has been incredibly tough, it is so nice to see her back on the pitch, being able to perform straight away. You never know that, you have the hope, otherwise I wouldn’t have put her on but you don’t know until you see. A special moment for her.
It has been a difficult start to the season, but hopefully this win is the moment that sparks things into life. The return of Beth Mead is a big boost obviously, and there are other key players to return too, so fingers crossed. As ever, Tim has all the post-game reaction from the manager on Arseblog News, and for more, there’s another excellent match day vlog, which you can see over on our YouTube channel.
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There was Interlull action for Martin Odegaard last night as he played the full 90 minutes of Norway’s 1-0 defeat to Spain. That result means Scotland have qualified for the European Championships, and also leaves Norway scrabbling to make it via the play-offs, but they are dependent on other results to get them there. David Raya was on the bench for Spain who have also qualified from that group.
The only other Arsenal player in action yesterday was Jakub Kiwior, who played the full game as Poland drew 1-1 with Moldova. There’s not much happening today, although Mohamed Elneny could get some minutes as Egypt play a friendly against Algeria, and there are players in action tomorrow and Wednesday, but we’ll look at that in the next couple of days.
And that’s really it. These recent Interlulls have been very quiet, more so than usual, and it also feels like they’re having a bigger impact on the season than before. There’s another one in November too, so that’s something to not look forward to.
Right, I’ll leave it there. We’ll have an Arsecast Extra for you a bit later on. Keep an eye out for the call for questions on Twitter @gunnerblog and @arseblog on Twitter with the hashtag #arsecastextra – or if you’re on Arseblog Member on Patreon, leave your question in the #arsecast-extra-questions channel on our Discord server.
For now, take it easy.
