Arsenal’s last chance of silverware this season disappeared on Wednesday evening when they drew 1-1 in the Women’s Super League with Brighton and Hove Albion.
It means they can no longer catch Manchester City at the top of the table, who are now confirmed as champions.
And it came four days after the Gunners’ defeat to Lyon in the semi-finals of the UEFA Women’s Champions League.
Striker Alessia Russo reflected afterwards on what she described as a “disappointing” week.
“It’s been a pretty heavy week of football in terms of results and emotions and things like that, but yes, it happens sometimes,” she said to the official club website.
“We’ve been on the other end of it and you know how football works. Sometimes you win, sometimes you don’t. It’s been tough but now we’ve got three games left and we want to put all our energy into that and then build on it for next season.
“There’s been some great learnings. I think you’ve seen some of our best football this year and moments and spells. I think it’s just about doing that consistently over a season. It’s long, it’s tough. You have to grind out results in different ways.
“But yes, I think to win trophies over the course of the season, you’ve got to be consistently really good and I think that going into next season, that’s something that we’ll push for. We’ll work really hard as players to do that and yeah, we’ll see what happens.”
Arsenal are going to work to be better next season, says Slegers
And that mindset was mirrored by head coach Renee Slegers.
“We set ourselves a goal to keep the league alive until the last playing day, and we needed three points today,” she said.
“We weren’t successful with that, and I think the first half was tough for us, the second half much better, back in the game, great momentum, created some chances, but not enough today, so, disappointed, going to do everything we can to get the second place in the league, and also congratulations to Man City.
“There’s plenty of learnings and at the end of the season we’ll do a bigger end of season review on all different parts of the season that has been, but of course we want to win more trophies for Arsenal and for the fans, so we’re going to do everything we can to be better next season.”
