{"id":8045,"date":"2026-05-13T22:23:40","date_gmt":"2026-05-13T22:23:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/?p=8045"},"modified":"2026-05-13T22:23:40","modified_gmt":"2026-05-13T22:23:40","slug":"renee-this-is-what-makes-football-special-interview-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/?p=8045","title":{"rendered":"Ren\u00e9e: \u201cThis is what makes football special\u201d | Interview | News"},"content":{"rendered":"


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There was no better way to end our final Barclays Women\u2019s Super League home game of the season than with a 93rd-minute Stina Blackstenius winner.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what happened in Wednesday night\u2019s 1-0 victory over Everton at Emirates Stadium, as we climbed above Chelsea into second in the division.<\/p>\n

Reflecting on the match, Ren\u00e9e Slegers said: \u201cSo happy to get the win and the fans had to wait long for the goal and\u00a0what I’m happy with is it’s hard of course where the turnarounds are very short and it’s\u00a0end of the season and you’ve gone through so much as a team and still fighting for second place.<\/p>\n

\u201cOf course, the emotions of the players that are going to leave us as well,\u00a0so if you look at it all together, we wanted a goal earlier but I’m so happy that the team showed\u00a0the mental resilience and I think two out of five game changers have direct impact on the goal as\u00a0well. So yeah, good team performance, 1-0 to Arsenal.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\n Read more<\/span> <\/p>\n

Report: Arsenal Women 1-0 Everton <\/span>
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We could certainly have had more goals on the night, as Beth Mead was unlucky to strike the woodwork twice, and Olivia Smith was also denied yet another Goal of the Season contender by the crossbar.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we were unlucky in those moments because I think if you get a goal earlier,\u00a0the game can settle in a different way and it also sometimes opens up spaces\u00a0because the opponent wants something,\u201d Ren\u00e9e added. \u201cSo yeah, like I said, I’m really happy with\u00a0the mental strength and resilience for us to score that goal, keep on believing and score\u00a0the goal with the help of the fans because they got it going as well and they made sure\u00a0that we kept on believing and drove us forward and yeah, just happy that we scored the late goal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Our head coach had the opportunity to speak to supporters directly after the game, after we\u2019d all given a big send off to the players who will be leaving us this summer.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe players so much deserve this moment,\u201d she said. \u201cThey’ve impacted the club, the people,\u00a0the football and just to see the connection, I think that’s what makes football so special,\u00a0that there’s something more, makes it more meaningful but yeah, really nice to see the\u00a0moment that all these players got.\u201d<\/p>\n

We informed Ren\u00e9e that we\u2019ve sold out our away allocation for Saturday\u2019s trip to Anfield, where we take on Liverpool in the final game of the season this weekend.<\/p>\n

\u201cSold out, that’s fantastic,\u201d she responded. \u201cYeah, no, we look forward to the game,\u00a0late night now and some good moments but we have to recover now and then we’ll travel to\u00a0Liverpool on Friday and then we go again.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Copyright 2026 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There was no better way to end our final Barclays Women\u2019s Super League home game…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8046,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pagelayer_contact_templates":[],"_pagelayer_content":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8045"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8045\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/8046"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}