The business end of the season is fast approaching as we return from the international break looking to wrap up our 2025/26 campaign firing on all cylinders.
In the months of March, April and May we will tackle UEFA Women’s Champions league quarter-finals with Chelsea, an Adobe Women’s FA Cup quarter-final with Brighton & Hove Albion and eight Barclays Women’s Super League matches, starting with Sunday’s trip to London City Lionesses.
Ahead of the weekend’s game in Bromley, Renée Slegers sat down for her pre-match press conference at the Sobha Realty Training Centre and spoke about the physical and mental challenges posed by having so many big games on the horizon.
“I think it’s always going to be both (physical and mental),” she said. “We have a really strong squad, a lot of players ready. If you look at the last block, there’s been a lot of involvement of different players. The players are ready to perform for us and now with Steph, Caitlin Foord and Kyra Cooney-Cross not being with us, we’re going to need everyone.
“Of course we know that we’re going into five London derbies and then Brighton at the end of the block, we’re active in three different competitions, so there’s of course mental demands, like there always will be, but also physical. We start with these two games and we know how London City has framed the game, it’s a big one for them, so we’ll have to be prepared.
“Then it’s West Ham and then we have those four games with a very short turnaround, so freshness is going to be key for us this block.”
Read more
Every word of Renée’s pre-London City presser
Our head coach was also asked if there’s been a shift in the team’s mentality now we’re approaching the stage of the season where so much is on the line.
“You can feel that it’s coming closer,” she said. “The players love it. We have competitors in our group, we’re in a great place. Before the international break, we didn’t want that block to stop because it was a really positive block for us. The results, obviously, the run of seven wins, but also everything we did as a group in the background to make everything really positive and challenging in a really good way.
“What we need to do is win every single game when we’re at Arsenal. But of course, there’s excitement in the team of us getting closer to trophies, so we really look forward to this block.”
Copyright 2026 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.
