Jonas Eidevall’s plans to elevate his Arsenal Women side to the next level includes playing matches against the club’s Under-16 boys’ team.
Arsenal narrowly missed out on the Women’s Super League title on Sunday, finishing a point behind Chelsea despite picking up four points against Emma Hayes’ side in their two meetings.
Eidevall’s side were left ruing a costly loss to now-relegated Birmingham City back in January, while they were also beaten by Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final last month.
With Chelsea setting the benchmark in the WSL, and the imperious Barcelona expected to defend their Champions League crown on 21 May, Eidevall is looking to narrow the gap and believes matches with the boys’ academy would make training “harder” than their games.
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“We have to have a good cooperation with our boys’ academy to involve them in practices and internal games, so we can play against something more physical and faster than we will ever play against in the Champions League, in order to set the benchmark,” Eidevall told The Athletic.
“That’s an astonishing opportunity that most football teams around the world would give everything in order to do; to see if we can make our training harder than the games.
“That means if we’re successful in training, then we will for sure be successful in games as well. We’ll have a little bit more time and it will be a little bit easier.
“That’s more something to speak to Per Mertesacker [Arsenal boys’ academy manager] with. Under-15 or 16 is usually a good age group where the physicality hasn’t grown so much on all the players. They are a little faster than our players but it’s not impossible to play against.”
Arsenal came unstuck at the quarter-final stage of the Champions League this season, losing 3-1 on aggregate to Wolfsburg, who then lost 5-3 to Barcelona in the semi-finals.
Before reaching the knockouts, Arsenal were twice outclassed by Barcelona in Group C, losing 4-1 away and then suffering a painful 4-0 home defeat.
Barcelona are heavy favourites to beat Lyon in the final, while they are yet to drop a single point in the league (W29), boasting a goal difference of 147 (scored 157, conceded 10) ahead of their 30th and final game against Atletico Marid this weekend.
They could yet improve in the summer as well, with Arsenal’s Vivianne Miedema out of contract this summer and linked with a move to Spain.
“We’ll do our best to try and make her stay,” Eidevall said of Miedema, who has been at Arsenal for six years.
“She moves the ball so well for us and she was one of the players that, when things got tough, she showed that self-confidence in going, ‘Give me the ball, I can play our way out of this’, and that was great to see.”
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