It’s rather apt with the Hammers up next that Renee Slegers feels it’s time to go through the toolbox to see what else we can come up with as we look to make it back-to-back wins in the Barclays Women’s Super League on Friday.
We head to the Chigwell Construction Stadium in Dagenham for our first away game of the season in high spirits on the back of last weekend’s 4-1 win over London City Lionesses at Emirates Stadium.
But, despite the positive momentum, our head coach insists we’ll have to be ready for a different type of challenge on Friday.
“This game tomorrow will be a different game,” she said in her pre-match press conference at the Sobha Realty Training Centre on Thursday. “Of course, we're going to play away and I think West Ham plays in a different structure.
“So I think we'll need to use other tools in our toolbox tomorrow, but of course, we always have to be prepared for any scenario.
“I know historically it’s always been a hard game for Arsenal to go to, it’s a hard ground. They play a type of football that they believe in and they’re very disciplined in the way they do things. But we’ll have to be that as well.
“Of course we believe in ourselves and our own qualities but we'll go there with humility because we know it's a hard game and we have things to prove for ourselves. So we need to understand the setting and the opposition. But at the end of the day we look a lot at what we want to bring to the game tomorrow and that's what we'll focus on.”
[Read more
Every word of Renee’s pre-West Ham presser](https://www.arsenal.com/news/every-word-renees-pre-west-ham-presser-0?utm_source=arsenaldotcom&utm_medium=embedded-article&utm_campaign=news)
Renee was also asked about the challenge of maintaining a strong identity in the WSL these days, and if it’s harder to do that while also wanting to be unpredictable.
“I think those things can go hand in hand,” she explained. “I think what we've tried to do in pre-season is create clarity in our identity, what we want to be and what we want to look like and how we do that. I think we have a good idea but I don't think it means that you have to be one-sided in everything you do.
“I think that's the nice thing about the WSL. It's getting better every year and you have so many different styles of football and I think you also see that every team is trying to do better and better in every phase of the game.
“So, like I said, you're more multidimensional. You can do different things depending on what's asked of you in the game. It's just a really good and challenging league so I'm really happy I'm in this league.”
Copyright 2025 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.