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How Arsenal swaggered to the Women's Super League title
Arsenal secured the Women's Super League title with a 4-0 win over Brighton on Sunday - Katie Whyatt examines the vital ingredients of their triumph...
The manager
Arsenal have swaggered and spun their way to the title playing a brand of football in the image of their coach. Joe Montemurro is Australian-born but of Italian descent, his family having fled southern Italy after the second world war. As a junior he joined Brunswick Juventus, a club for Italian immigrants, that early, seamless fusion of two cultures setting the tone for Montemurro’s later coaching career. As a player, he spent six months in Switzerland as a deep-lying midfield playmaker, where, witnessing the European culture of professional football for the first time, his tactical fascination for the game was born.
He retired at 28 and began obsessively studying “the AC Milans of the early 90s, the Dutch teams in the early 80s and late 70s, South American football and the freedom, the fluidity”, taking on roles in youth and men’s football Down Under before switching to women’s football in 2014.
Montemurro has created his own masterpiece in England, where the coordinated shuffling and gliding of his Arsenal side, teamed with their trademark, relentless forward thrust, has seen them win their league games with an aggregate score of 69-13.
“Arsenal’s always been synonymous with an attractive, proactive brand of football,” Montemurro said. “It’s a football that excites, a football that entices. The most important thing is a level of fluidity. It’s restoring those beliefs in your everyday work and your everyday language.”
Montemurro claims there are “certain levels of insurance policy” with his style - namely, six ‘style rules’ that his players fall back on, like a safety net, if the game risks running away from them.
“One rule is not to play it in a passing line,” says Arsenal midfielder Lia Walti. “No matter which team we’re going to play, no matter which system we’re going to play, this is a rule, and you should not break this. Even if you get pressed, you just want us to find solutions between the lines.” Others include countering when opponents make deep runs and no square passes, the side having pinpointed that these are the passes from which they are most likely to concede. “It’s just something you can catch when you forget how you want to play,” Walti adds. “If I do this rule, I can come into the game.”
The players
Arsenal’s playing squad comprises eleven different nationalities and - despite an injury crisis that saw them return from the winter break with seven first team players in the treatment room - there is not a player who has been on the pitch this season who has not enacted Montemurro’s brief to perfection.
England’s player of the moment Beth Mead has replicated her international form at club level; Jordan Nobbs was one of the side’s leading lights until she sustained the ACL injury that has ruled her out of this summer’s World Cup; defender Leah Williamson, still only 22, has again been relentlessly visible in a season that saw her reach 100 Arsenal appearances. Arsenal have three players in the WSL Team of the Year: Kim Little, Lia Walti and Vivianne Miedema.
Rangy forward Miedema, 22, has scored 22 league goals this season and when the side were hit by injuries she was their ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card. She describes herself as a cross between a number nine and a number ten and at her best couples instinctive finishing with intelligent vision.
Strength of opposition
In an eleven-team league that will become twelve next season, there is little margin for error because there are so few points available. Manchester City may finish the season unbeaten domestically but it is not enough; the constant jostling between the WSL’s top two has, to a certain extent, mirrored the Liverpool and City axis in the men’s top flight, albeit over a more condensed run of league fixtures.
Manchester City Women could finish the season unbeaten but have drawn five; in the men’s Premier League, Liverpool have drawn seven. Chelsea Women have drawn six and lost two. Arsenal have lost just twice, to Manchester City and Chelsea, but have won every other league game. Manchester City would have been worthy champions in any other year but this season the obdurate Bristol City - against whom City were held to two of those draws - have proven their kryptonite and the title race’s eventual kingmakers.
“Sustained success is incredibly difficult,” said the Chelsea boss Emma Hayes. “[With] the few league fixtures, and we’ve known it from having won leagues, you can’t draw two and lose one. It’s over. Until that becomes a 25, 26 game league schedule, you can’t lose more than two in a campaign. I think we knew in October our league campaign was over.”