Arsenal Women bounce back from Champions League heartache

Arsenal Women 1 Leicester Women 0

Arsenal put Monday’s Champions League heartbreak behind them and returned to winning ways in the Women’s Super League as Frida Maanum’s eye-catching strike from range beat ever-improving Leicester City.

It could so easily have been a crash back to Earth for Arsenal as they played in front of 3,982 in the more modest surroundings of Meadow Park, four days after their dramatic extra-time loss to Wolfsburg in front of an English club women’s match record crowd of 60,063. But Jonas Eidevall found an amusing way to explain why he enjoys both environments.

“It’s one of the things I pride myself on, I enjoy being at the Emirates in front of 60,000 and I always enjoy being here in front of a full crowd as well. I’m the same with restaurants. I can really enjoy fine dining but I can really like a place where it’s just like greasy food and a cold beer as well. I can do both, and that’s what you need to do as a football team as well,” the Arsenal manager said with a smile.

The Swede added that his team “could easily have scored more than the one goal that we did” and indeed they could. Katie McCabe had a first-half penalty saved by Leicester goalkeeper Janina Leitzig, who the East Midlands club’s manager Willie Kirk hailed after the game as the “best keeper in the WSL” and the “best signing of the January window”.

As the hour mark passed with the match still goalless, you couldn’t help but start to wonder if Arsenal were going to suffer the agony of fading out Champions League contention just four days after being dumped out of this year’s competition. But Maanum curled in superbly to win it and was twice further denied by Leitzig as she almost grabbed a hat-trick of long-range strikes.

Leicester had lost all three of their previous WSL meetings with Arsenal by four goals or more and Kirk took solace from Friday’s performance, adding: “It’s a really good barometer – my first game in charge was against Arsenal and we were beaten 4-0 and we were lucky it was only four. That shows you the journey we’ve been on. We don’t get any points for that but we do get a lot of respect and pride.”

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