Arsenal Women Arsecast Episode 175: Points Divided against United
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What were the expectations for Manchester United’s low‑block strategy and how did Arsenal anticipate it?
Bye.
Hello and welcome to the Arsenal Women Arsecast and Arseplug.com with me, your host Tim Stillman. Looking back at Saturday's 1-1 draw with Manchester United and in this space we probably could just replay last week's podcast about the new and old draw at home to Crystal Palace and most of it would still be pretty pertinent to be honest. Now because this podcast is going out a little bit later than we probably wanted for scheduling reasons and To be frank, on Sunday, I didn't really have much of a voice. I'm struggling with a terrible strain of man flu at the moment. We're not going to go absolutely blow by blow on this one. We're going to go a little bit bigger picture. But again, a lot of the questions and a lot of the points are the same.
And we'll probably major a little bit more on the listener questions, particularly because this is going to go out on the morning that Arsenal play against Kyrgios in the Champions League. And in fact, all the pre-match questions press for that has been done and I've been at Colney today doing all of that so we'll make it a little bit of a Kyrgyz preview as well but here to dissect all of that with me as ever is our co-host Jamie Spanger Jamie how are you doing?
It's not been a good weekend, Tim. It's been a bad weekend to be an Arsenal fan. I'm okay. The sun is shining. I have to look on the bright side of life and say at least summer's coming for me. It was a bad weekend. I actually made a group of my friends watch the men's game and then the women's game. So our footballing endeavors ended at about 4.30 a.m. on Sunday morning. And they kind of all looked at me. They're not really football fans at all. And they looked at me and they said, do you do this every week? And I was like, well, Not usually, actually.
It's
just been a bad weekend. Yeah, frustrated Tim. Not really excited to get into it, but I do think there's a lot of meat on the bone that we could probably complain about and dissect and maybe a bit of group therapy.
Yeah, indeed. Yeah, I watched the men's game in the media room, actually, and that didn't set me up particularly well for this game, it must be said. Yeah. I think the kind of first thing to go into here, really, and I can't remember whether we talked about this last week. I did a show with Connor Roberts in the build-up to this game. He runs a very good Manchester United women's YouTube channel, and we were talking about the likely approaches of the teams, and certainly in that, particularly because I had a more United focus, I said I completely expected after what happened last weekend with United losing 5-0, my vast experience of watching football over many, many years, more years than I care to admit, every single time you play a team that's just been beaten 5-0,
they will make damn sure that does not happen again, every single time. So I absolutely expected nothing less than a United low block, and not least because they had a lot of success doing that against Arsenal last season, and with their start to the season, and the fact that I think they've got Sheffield United in the Subway Cup this week, like... They can kind of save all of Ava Ollard's attacking principles and all that for games they've got coming up. Was there any doubt for you about how United would approach this? And I guess when the team sheets come out and they've got three fullbacks on the pitch and Alatoon's not there, I think we knew what kind of game we were in for here about a week before it kicked off.
Certainly, especially when you look at the fact that Renée Slaggers has not faced a Manchester United team that has really tried to press up the pitch and attack. And every single time she's played against them, we've suffered. There was obviously the 1-1 draw at the very start of her managerial tenure when she came in as interim. And that was frustrating. But then last season was low block after low block. And then obviously they reaped the rewards of that in the League Cup as well. So yeah, I think that everyone around the stadium and everyone, every fan of the football club thought that that was going to be the case.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What were the expectations for Manchester United’s low‑block strategy and how did Arsenal anticipate it?
0:00–11:21
2
How did the starting XI and surprise selections (e.g., Stina Blackstenius, Russo) affect Arsenal’s game plan?
11:21–24:24
3
What impact did the substitutions (Selena Cury, Smilla Holmberg) have on the match and the late equaliser?
24:24–37:32
4
Why are fans frustrated with the rotating midfield and forward line, and how does it affect team identity?
37:32–47:38