How do you build a buccaneering team who sweep away all before them? How do you turn a team who suffer a 3-1 cup final defeat by invincible double winners into one who demolish them 5-0 in their next meeting to maintain an unbeaten start to a new season?
Joe Montemurro’s three-quarter season in charge at Arsenal was about laying the foundations for just such a transformation. Working without expectations with a team laden with stars – not least four Dutch European Championship winners – but lacking direction, the Australian set about his task.
“We work to a system and to a style that creates a foundation,” says Montemurro, in London Colney just shy of a year on from our first interview days after he landed in the capital. “You could call it defensive stability; we call it more balance and management. We balance and manage the situation when we don’t have the ball, in order to regain the ball, and then when we’ve got the ball we try to keep it. Within that we have certain patterns and structures that we try to achieve to unlock an opposing team.”
In his first season the initial task was shoring up a leaky defence. Eight goals conceded in three league games under Pedro Martínez Losa gave way to a nine-game unbeaten run with eight clean sheets.
A positive approach to play when out of possession, Montemurro says, was the key: “We do it in a productive way that suits our style. We’re always front-footed in our defending – it’s proactive defending to win the ball as high up as we can. And then having the mechanisms to deal with it lower if they do beat that line. There are some certain balance and management things that create the framework for my players to be creative and imaginative.”
He makes it sound easy and the transition seems to have been smooth, with the players extolling the virtues of his methods, philosophy and demeanour.
How the manager has handled the bumps on his road has been vital to maintaining harmony. “There’s always difficult patches when you instil belief and a philosophy and I’m a bit hard-headed with the way I want to play and the way I want to do things,” he says. “Sometimes players fall into old habits and situations, and it’s not their fault.
“It’s important to identify those moments and put them in situations where they understand that moment and what we are trying to do with our philosophy.”
Arsenal scored 16 goals in their first three games and although West Ham gave them a scare, twice taking the lead before losing 4-3, the first big test of how far they had come was the visit toagainst Chelsea in mid-October.
“You want me to divulge secrets, don’t you?” says Montemurro, laughing, when asked to break down their 5-0 demolition of the champions. “They have players that work in half-areas. They have players that are very difficult to mark. You look at their top three of Drew Spence, Ramona Bachmann and Fran Kirby, they work in between lines and so we had to be a lot smarter, in terms of finding a balance between marking them and marking space too. We always thought if we were smart enough in that, we would find space going forward.”
Chelsea began on the front foot, though, with Ji So-yun and Kirby combining dangerously to trouble the Arsenal backline. Within minutes the hosts carved out their first opening, Kirby squaring to Adelina Engman but the French goalkeeper Pauline Peyraud-Magnin was equal to her shot.
“Even after the chance that they missed early on, I didn’t feel uncomfortable because I knew where it was coming from, what was happening and how we could fix it,” Montemurro says. “We were a little bit, I wouldn’t say negative, probably a little more patient in our buildup and patient when they had the ball too. We needed to assess the situation because when we regained it, we needed to understand where and when to go forward. It worked.
“I’ll go to the emotional side because it was a big game for us. It was our first big game, we hadn’t played them since the FA Cup final, so I think there was some emotional settling for us to do. That caused that chance more than them being better than us. We guarded spaces a little more, rather than being proactive and forward thinking.
“It was just a matter of us getting into our rhythm. We just didn’t get our spaces right, we didn’t get our distances right. Once we got that right it was fine. Our distances were too compact, we weren’t giving ourselves enough breathing space to play and when that changed we started to play our way.”
Was it the complete performance? “We’re still to have the complete performance,” Montemurro says. “There have been ebbs and flows in all games that we assess and look to fix. And does the complete performance exist? I don’t know, this is a very tough league.”
On Sunday, the league leaders play at their closest rivals, Manchester City, with a team slightly stunted by injury, having a chance to pull nine points clear – a hefty gap for rivals to close halfway through a 20-game league season.
Talking points
• Rangers’ board announced at their AGM that they will be tripling their investment in women’s football. A statement read: “We have not given enough financial and other support to our women footballers. Initiatives are being put in place to redress this historical imbalance.”
• Last week Der Spiegel and Football Leaks exposed a clause in Women’s Super League contracts which states that clubs can sack players if out injured for three or more months. In contrast, men’s players can be injured for 18 months before they can have their contract terminated, giving men six times longer to heal and recover without the risk of the sack.
• Cambridge United beat Cambridge City 2-0 in first round of the FA Cup after the tie had to be replayed following complaints over the size of the pitch, found to be approximately 14% smaller than regulations permit. City had beaten their rivals 2-1 in the initial game.
• Support from across football has flooded in for 18-year-old goalkeeper Jordan Dawes, who suffered a stroke. Dawes, who plays in the fifth tier for Kent Football United, has received messages from players such as Carly Telford and Fran Kirby, as well as gloves and a signed shirt from David de Gea.
