Heated Rivalry or One Battle After Another? Bompastor and Slegers square up!

“It’s always a big one for the fans and the rivalry,” says Erin Cuthbert. She views the Chelsea v Arsenal matches as a battle, and when she comes up against fellow Scot Kim Little, they “hate each other on the pitch, and love each other after, and that’s how it goes”.

But I wondered what Arsenal boss Renée Slegers and Chelsea head coach Sonia Bompastor make of this WSL clash. Is it a heated rivalry, or is it more like one battle after another? So I asked them.

Renée, everyone’s been talking about this new TV series called Heated Rivalry – and Erin Cuthbert speaks about looking forward to the battle.

There used to be a lot of enmity between head coaches, even down to shoving. But it seems to me that particularly this season, everything has cooled down a little bit. Is it deliberate and do you welcome it?

Renée Slegers:

I don’t think it helps.

It’s not within my personality to go and find fights down the sideline.

I don’t think that’s going to help the game.

But of course, we are winners, and we want to win this game and there’s a rivalry between the two teams.

And that’s always going to be there.

But no, in my opinion, it’s not going to help the players on the pitch where it needs to happen.

Do you look forward to these matches, where it’s maybe more a battle of wills?

Yeah, I really look forward to it because we want to play against good teams and it’s very challenging and we want to take challenges.

So we look forward to tomorrow.

We come off of three games where yes, we had one win against Villa where we score two goals, but we want to go and prove ourselves because there’s a lot of things that we do well.

And we want to do those things really well tomorrow because we’re playing against a really, really good team.

Also, there’s high motivation for us to get things right and doing that against Chelsea away, that’s the scenario and we take the scenario and we want to go and win and get points.

Sonia, do you think less animosity, and the cooling down of head coaches in WSL rivalries – especially Chelsea and Arsenal – is deliberate?

Sonia Bompastor:

No, I don’t think it’s deliberate.

I think it’s nice also to have the competition between both clubs.

It brings something special into the women’s game.

I think as much as it’s a battle on the pitch, I think you also need to show respect.

I think Arsenal is a top team.

The club is doing great for the women’s game, and I think you need to respect that.

So as a manager, I will always be respectful.

But for sure, coming into the game tomorrow, I want to give them hard time on the pitch.

Sometimes as a manager, when you are in the game, you can be a little bit emotional, but never missing respect to the opponent.

So that’s my philosophy.

And yeah, Renee is a nice coach.

We never fight together.

There is no reason for us to fight, but maybe, if you want us to create something for you to speak about, I can talk to Renée tomorrow and make sure something happens!

You can if you like! But the other thing about Arsenal is they’re going through a bit of a goal drought, as you did for a while, where it was hard for you to score against teams like Everton and Liverpool.

There’s a weird thing with form where you can go through a huge upsurge, then absolutely fall off a cliff.

Yeah, but again, when you look at Arsenal’s team, they are top players in the squad.

I think they create a lot of opportunities.

They have a lot of quality, so they can score in any game.

So hopefully tomorrow they will be quiet.

We’ll try to work hard to make that happen.

Yeah, they have top quality, and they are a team who can score at any time in any game.

That’s what we expect tomorrow; for them to come strong and to have the quality or show the desire to score goals.

So we’ll need to make sure we’ll stay strong defensively and we defend well in the game.