We climbed to third in the Barclays Women\u2019s Super League with a 1-0 win over league leaders Manchester City at Emirates Stadium on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Ren\u00e9e Slegers chose to start Olivia Smith in a central position up front for the first time and was richly rewarded when she got on the end of a magnificent Mariona Caldentey pass to open the scoring, and that was all it took to separate the sides.<\/p>\n
FIRST HALF<\/p>\n
Former Gunner Vivianne Miedema went for goal straight away after kick-off, shooting wide of the bottom left from the edge of the area. Caitlin Foord\u2019s cross at the other end evaded everyone and went out for a goal-kick.<\/p>\n
We broke the deadlock in the 17th minute when Mariona played a tidy one-two with Kim Little and sent Olivia Smith through on goal. She muscled past Rebecca Knaak and went around Ayaka Yamashita before rolling the ball across the line for 1-0.<\/p>\n
Foord went for goal from distance but shot straight at Yamashita as we looked to double our lead, and Katie McCabe won the ball in the final third before having a go with plenty of power, but the ball flew just wide of the post.<\/p>\n
Khadija Shaw got her first sight of goal in the 38th minute, but her effort was too soft and central to trouble Daphne van Domselaar.<\/p>\n
We came close again to making it 2-0 with half-time approaching, Foord\u2019s shot coming out to Mariona, who volleyed over the bar from just inside the D, and Alessia Russo forcing a good save from Yamashita, aiming towards the bottom left with the Man City goalkeeper getting down well to concede a corner.<\/p>\n
The latter was called into action again moments later as Beth Mead\u2019s corner reached Russo and her header was pushed onto the roof of the net.<\/p>\n
SECOND HALF<\/p>\n
It took until the 57th minute for anything of note to occur in the second half, when Shaw tried to catch Van Domselaar out with a cross towards the near post, but our goalkeeper had it covered. Smith quickly broke free on the right and cut in onto her left foot before winning a corner for us at the other end.<\/p>\n
Our pressure on City continued as Little carried us forward and found Foord on the left, but she struck into the side netting.<\/p>\n
The coaching team made their first change in the 67th minute with Frida Maanum replacing Mead. Miedema found a way through with 12 minutes left on the clock, but McCabe did really well to make a vital tackle.<\/p>\n
We made a triple change with seven minutes to go as Smilla Holmberg, Leah Williamson and Chloe Kelly came on for McCabe, Steph Catley and Smith.<\/p>\n
Miedema again came close to creating an opening for an equaliser late on but Williamson got her body in the way before Laia Codina replaced Mariona.<\/p>\n
Six minutes were added on at the end of the second half and we held onto all three points.<\/p>\n
What’s next<\/p>\n
We return to Belgium to face OH Leuven once again in the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarter-final play-offs. It’s a 5.45pm kick-off (UK time) on Wednesday, February 11.<\/p>\n
Then, we’re off to the Broadfield Stadium in Crawley to take on Brighton & Hove Albion in Sunday’s WSL encounter at 2.30pm.<\/p>\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","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"We climbed to third in the Barclays Women\u2019s Super League with a 1-0 win over league leaders Manchester…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":280712,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[85,46,105],"class_list":{"0":"post-280832","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-il","9":"tag-israel","10":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280832","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280832"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280832\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280712"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280832"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280832"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280832"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}