Arsenal Women maintained their perch at the top of the WSL with a 2-0 win over Birmingham City on Sunday afternoon. Tim Stillman caught up with manager Joe Montemurro after the game exclusively for Arsebog News.

On the performance…

I probably expected that we would be lacking a bit of rhythm and a little slow, when you haven’t played for three weeks you expect that. But all in all it was a professional performance and e got the job done.

On missing chances to score more goals today…

We train to get the ball to a certain point on the pitch and then it’s down to the execution to put the ball in the net, we had a lot of practice at missing chances today!

On what he said to Jordan Nobbs just before she scored her goal…

We lowered our wingers to pull their full backs out knowing that Jordan can attack that space and lo and behold that’s what happened.

On the increasing importance of Viki Schnaderbeck…

We’re blessed with centre-backs that can pick passes and start the play, that can organise according to when we need to go forward and when to prepare the passes and Viki is very good at this.

We felt in the first half that she was passing to Katie McCabe at left-back too early and she was getting pressed, so we asked her to drive in a little bit more to eliminate the first line of pressure so we could progress and we did that in the second half.

On Emma Mitchell’s loan move to Spurs…

She’s still our player, we just felt with the pecking order of the left-back position she wasn’t going to play much and Emma needs to play. She’s been unfortunate with injury problems, illness and other fitness concerns. We decided it was better for her to go somewhere and get games, she needs to play.

On Katrine Veje and Jen Beattie’s fitness…

They’re not far off, we’re in a position where we can take precautions. Beth was ready to play today too, but was still a bit tender with the knock that she got at Everton, so we decided to give her another week. Same with Jen and Katrine, so we’re in a good position for the second half of the season.

On January transfer window plans…

Watch this space!

On a year unbeaten at Meadow Park…

We love playing in front of our fans and entertaining them, we love playing here, we know the scale and we know the pitch well and it suits our style, this is our home.