Chloe Kelly has not featured in the Arsenal starting line-up recently – coming on only in the 87th minute in the North London derby against Tottenham Hotspur.
But head coach Renee Slegers brushed off any suggestion that this is down to managing her load or a fitness issue.
“I think a football player is never really totally pain-free, but Chloe is OK,” Slegers told a press conference on Tuesday afternoon. “She’s fit and she has been fit for a while.
“Of course, the start of pre-season, she missed the West Ham game and a couple of training sessions. But since then, she’s been building back and some things take a little bit longer than others.
“But she’s fully fit and available.”
Renee Slegers: We know our strength
The Gunners face Real Madrid in the UEFA Women’s Champions League on Wednesday evening, and Slegers admitted it had been a tough start to the season for her side – currently sitting fourth in the Women’s Super League, and losing a 2-0 advantage against Bayern Munich in the Champions League last week.
“We acknowledge that it’s difficult, but we also know the strength in the team. I think we know what we’re capable of and the strengths that we have in the squad.
“Of course, again, we’ve analysed the game and picked out the details. But if you tell the story of the block, Leicester is a good performance, it’s a good result. Chelsea, I think it’s two top teams going against each other. I think we dominate parts of the game and we wanted more from a results perspective. Bayern is a good first half against, again, a top opponent. Second half, we are, of course, very critical of ourselves, we give it away.
“There’s a lot of games and then a short turnaround into a north London derby. If you look at what we concede from an xG perspective, it’s close to nothing. But we don’t create enough in that game and we’ve seen that if you compare it to last year and how easy it was for us to score goals and the type of opportunities we created, that’s a little bit harder for us at the moment, so that’s something we’ve looked at.”
