Arsenal Women Beat Crystal Palace 2-1 In First Pre-Season Match

Arsenal Women are back, pre-season is underway, and we’ve started with a 2-1 win over Crystal Palace. But judging by some of the reaction I’ve seen online, you could be forgiven for thinking we’d just lost our opening game of the WSL season. So I want to tell you what we actually know about this behind-closed-doors friendly, why Lisa Baum’s first Arsenal goal immediately got my attention, and why the timing of Chloe Kelly scoring the winner made me smile perhaps a little bit more than it should have. Most importantly though, I want to talk about how we approach pre-season because there’s a phrase I think we’re going to come back to quite a lot over the next few weeks: don’t overreact, but pay attention. 

Arsenal Women began their pre-season preparations on Saturday afternoon with a 2-1 win over Crystal Palace at the Sobha Realty Training Centre, and we now actually have official reports from both clubs, which is really useful because although none of us was there and there was no broadcast, the two reports line up pretty much exactly in terms of what happened. Palace started well and, according to their report, held their shape under some early Arsenal pressure. Alessia Russo created the first opportunity for Abi Conway, whose effort was comfortably gathered by new Palace goalkeeper Pauline Peyraud-Magnin, before Olivia Smith also tested her from just outside the area. Then, on 25 minutes, Palace took the lead through Shanade Hopcroft, who’s currently training with the club. She picked up a loose ball in midfield and scored a worldie from distance beyond Misa Rodríguez, and Arsenal nearly responded before half-time when Alessia got a curling effort away, but Peyraud-Magnin made the save and Palace went into the break 1-0 ahead. Both teams made changes for the second half, Arsenal actually changed the entire eleven according to their report, and Shae Yañez replaced Peyraud-Magnin in the Palace goal. Lisa Baum tested her early on before Arsenal eventually found the equaliser with 15 minutes remaining, and this is where it gets really, really interesting because Palace’s description of the goal is that Lisa Baum received the ball on the edge of the area, turned inside and struck high into the net. If you’ve been following Trailblazers for the last few weeks, those words should sound quite familiar.

Now, before I get onto Lisa Baum and Chloe Kelly, there’s something else I want to address because I’ve already seen some of the reaction, intense reaction, to this game online and apparently we’re worried. I’ve seen people complaining that Arsenal conceded first. I’ve seen people pointing out that we were behind for most of the game. I’ve seen the inevitable calls that we urgently need to sign another centre-back, particularly because we’ve allowed Laia Codina to leave, and I’m sitting here thinking, based on what? Seriously, what are some fans basing any of this on? None of us watched the game. It was a behind-closed-doors pre-season friendly at the training ground. There was no broadcast, no highlights, at least not at the time I’m writing this, and the information we have comes from the match reports published by Arsenal and Crystal Palace. Any other reporting you’re seeing online basically regurgitates almost verbatim those match reports. Both reports tell us that the goal Arsenal conceded was Shanade Hopcroft picking up a loose ball and scoring what Palace themselves describe as a stunning long-range strike, so unless someone commenting online has somehow acquired footage that the rest of us haven’t seen, how on earth have we gone from that to Arsenal desperately need a centre-back? That’s exactly the sort of leap I want us, Trailblazers, to resist. 

And there’s some really important context here as well because Crystal Palace were playing their third pre-season match. Not their first, not their second, their third. They’d already played Oxford United and Real Madrid. Arsenal were playing our first. That matters. Palace have already had two games to start putting minutes into players’ legs, start building combinations, start getting used to one another again and finding some kind of match rhythm. Arsenal haven’t. And then look at the way this game was played. Arsenal changed the entire eleven at half-time, so effectively you’ve got two different Arsenal teams playing 45 minutes each with new signings, academy players and established first-team players all being mixed together. How much rhythm and chemistry are you expecting them to develop in 45 minutes? And again, Trailblazers, when I say you, I’m not necessarily talking to you, you’re not the problem. I’m obviously externalising this out to the fans who’ve been heavily, heavily critical after this result. 

These friendlies, this is precisely what these types of games are for. They’re not mini WSL matches where the objective is to put out your strongest eleven, execute the finished tactical plan and demonstrate to supporters that you’re ready to win the league. They’re opportunities to put footballers back onto a football pitch, build fitness, look at combinations, give younger players opportunities, integrate our new signings and gradually increase the intensity as we move towards the start of the season proper. And even the Laia Codina argument needs perspective. Laia was not playing week in, week out for Arsenal last season. She had appearances towards the end of the campaign and, during the campaign, she made some last-minute substitution appearances, usually just before or after the 90-minute mark, to basically come in in place of an attacker and try and just bolster us so that we could hold a result. We’re not talking about Arsenal suddenly removing someone who played every single minute at the heart of the defence and replacing her with no one.

Katie Reid will be coming back into this group as well this season, and we’ve literally just spent an episode talking about young players and pathways. We can’t demand opportunities for exceptional young Arsenal players and then at the same time panic about signing somebody to stand in front of them at the first opportunity. Now, could Arsenal still sign another defender before the transfer window closes? Course they could. Maybe Renée and the recruitment team already intend to, maybe they’re already looking at options. But we don’t know. And that’s the point. We don’t know what happened defensively against Palace beyond the limited information contained in these two match reports. We don’t know what Renée was asking particular players to do. We don’t know what combinations she wanted to test. We don’t know how hard individual players have been training this week or what physical loads they’re carrying. We don’t even have enough information to properly analyse the build-up to the goal that Arsenal conceded.

What we do know is that Arsenal’s first pre-season game was against a Palace side playing their third pre-season game. Arsenal fielded two completely different elevens in each half. They went behind to a long-range goal and the second group came back to win the game 2-1. I’m really struggling to find the disaster in there. I’m actually encouraged by all of this. This is something I want us to remember as we go through pre-season because there are going to be performances that aren’t particularly polished. There might even be some defeats. Spoiler alert, players are going to make mistakes. Combinations won’t always work. Somebody’s going to have a bad 45 minutes and social media is immediately going to decide that they shouldn’t be anywhere near the first team. Trailblazers, don’t get dragged into it. Like I obviously have. Ask what we’re actually looking at. Ask what do we actually know. And perhaps most importantly, ask whether the person shouting loudest online has any more information than the rest of us do, because sometimes people just like to moan. And that’s their prerogative. Football would probably cease to function without supporters complaining about something. But Trailblazers doesn’t have to, and is not going to, follow them down that road. 

We can be critical of Arsenal when there’s something worth criticising. We absolutely should be. But criticism should come from evidence and context, not deciding that being 1-0 down at half-time in the first behind-closed-doors friendly of August means there’s a crisis at centre-back or through the squad in general. So I’m going to take something rather different from this result. Arsenal got their first pre-season minutes into the squad. Some of our young players got opportunities, our new signings got onto the pitch, they experienced going a goal down, they responded to it and they won the game. And two of the players involved in that turnaround give us something really, really interesting to talk about: Lisa Baum and Chloe Kelly. Clutch Chloe Kelly.

Sophie Harwood created an opportunity for Lisa Baum relatively early in the second half, and Baum got a shot away which forced a save from Palace goalkeeper Shae Yañez. Then, with about 15 minutes left, Bryony-Rose Brodie found her around the edge of the penalty area and according to Arsenal’s report, Lisa came inside and fired high into the Palace net. And when I read that part of the report I thought, hang on a minute, because we’ve talked about Lisa Baum before on Trailblazers when we signed her, and I also did a preview of her when we were rumoured to be signing her. She’s still a relatively unknown quantity for a lot of Arsenal supporters and that’s completely understandable. She’s a very young player coming into Arsenal from Hoffenheim and unless you’ve been paying particularly close attention to German football, you’re probably not going to have watched enormous amounts of her, if anything at all. So when Arsenal signed her I went away and tried to understand what kind of footballer we were getting, and one of the things that stood out was this tendency to drive forward from wide positions, come inside and shoot.

She’s direct and wants to travel with the ball. She’s not necessarily looking to get to the byline every single time and put a cross into the box. She’s quite happy coming inside around the edge of the area and trying to affect the game herself. And then here we are in her first pre-season appearance for Arsenal, and what does the match report tell us? Brodie finds Baum around the edge of the area, Lisa comes inside and she scores. Now, everybody, calm down. I’m not sitting here declaring that we’ve discovered the next superstar of world football because Lisa Baum has scored against Crystal Palace in a behind-closed-doors pre-season friendly. That would be a ridiculous thing to claim. But this is where I think following players from the very beginning becomes really interesting, particularly for those of you who are newer to Arsenal Women and maybe haven’t experienced this before. We’ve identified a characteristic in her game. We’ve said this is something Lisa Baum likes to do. And now we’ve got our first little example of her doing exactly that in an Arsenal shirt. So file that away somewhere in your brain, somewhere in your memory banks.

The next time you see Lisa receive the ball out wide and start travelling inside with it, watch what she does next. Does she look for the pass? Does she keep driving? Does she create the angle to shoot? Because rather than me simply telling you that Lisa Baum is a talented young footballer, I want us to start learning together what makes Lisa Baum, Lisa Baum. That’s much more interesting. And hopefully, as pre-season continues and we actually get opportunities to watch her, we’ll begin putting more of those pieces together. But scoring your first goal for Arsenal in your first match for Arsenal isn’t a bad place to start.

And then there’s Chloe Kelly, which brings me to Arsenal’s winner, and I have to admit the timing of this one made me smile. If you’ve been following Trailblazers over the last couple of episodes, or you’ve read the Chloe Kelly piece on ArsenalWomenTrailblazers.com, you’ll know we’ve spent a lot of time talking about Chloe recently. We’ve talked about the injury-hit season she’s just come through, talked about her saying that she needed the summer to reset physically and mentally. We’ve talked about her career, the ACL, those enormous moments for England, coming home to Arsenal and, more recently, the completely unwarranted abuse that she receives online. And then on Friday night I found myself dealing with more of it. And you know what? I’m not going to repeat any of what I saw said online or what people were saying to me because, quite frankly, it was downright disgusting. Also, some of those same so-called supporters, and I use that term loosely, were also slagging Katie McCabe off at the same time. Again, I’m not… do you know what? I’m not going to repeat what was said, and that’s probably a separate conversation with regards to Katie for another time.

But some of the, I guess, less extreme comments were things like: I don’t think Chloe Kelly should be starting for Arsenal. I think someone else gives us more in that position. I don’t think we’ve seen the best of Chloe since she came back. That’s all fine. We can have those conversations, that’s football. But when everything becomes she’s rubbish, she contributes nothing, get rid of her, she’s done nothing since she joined Arsenal, we’ve stopped having a conversation about football and started reducing a human being and an elite athlete to whatever happened the last time we happened to watch them play. And context matters. Chloe has just come through an injury-hit season. She’s talked openly about needing this summer as a physical and mental reset, and we’ve already discussed why that matters given everything else her body has been through during her career. So what I want from Chloe Kelly in August isn’t proof. She does not need to prove anything to me in a pre-season friendly. I want Chloe healthy. I want Chloe playing football. I want her getting minutes into her legs. I want her rediscovering her rhythm and confidence and hopefully enjoying herself once again. 

And according to Arsenal’s report, she came onto the pitch in the second half, controlled a difficult high ball and steered a half-volley beyond Yañez into the far corner. Arsenal 2, Crystal Palace 1. And I’m sorry, but after some of the conversations I was having a couple of nights ago, I enjoyed that. I really, really did.

Now, what does this all actually mean? I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Chloe Kelly scoring the winner in Arsenal’s first pre-season friendly proves everybody who criticised her wrong. Of course I’m not, because that would be every bit as ridiculous as somebody telling me she’s suddenly not good enough for Arsenal because she’s had an injury-hit season. One goal does not prove Chloe Kelly is going to have an incredible season. One goal from Lisa Baum doesn’t tell us she’s ready to rip up the WSL. And Arsenal beating Crystal Palace 2-1 behind closed doors doesn’t tell us we’re going to win the league. But I think there’s a phrase I’m going to keep coming back to throughout pre-season: don’t overreact, but pay attention. Pay attention to Lisa Baum receiving the ball around the edge of the area, coming inside and scoring, because that’s a characteristic of her game we’ve already identified here on Trailblazers. Pay attention to Chloe Kelly being back on a football pitch and making an immediate contribution after the season she’s just had. Pay attention to our youngsters getting minutes alongside established internationals because we’ve just spent an entire episode talking about pathways and why these opportunities matter. And pay attention to what Renée Slegers is experimenting with as we move through pre-season because the objective right now isn’t collecting victories, it’s getting this Arsenal team ready for when winning actually matters.

This was actually my first attempt at a match report for Trailblazers, and I’ve tried to bring something different because, as I said earlier, all the reports out there on this, and there aren’t that many, are pretty much a regurgitation of the official match reports. I wanted to go a little bit deeper and, just as always, get us thinking about things a little bit more, and hopefully I’ve brought some perspective and a bit of colour to what would otherwise have been a really, really boring match report. And if you disagree with something I’ve said here, or you think there’s something I’ve missed, tell me. I want to get better, and sometimes getting better isn’t all about people telling you what you’ve done right, it’s just as much about people telling you what you could be doing better.

Lisa Baum has her first Arsenal goal. Chloe Kelly came up clutch with the winner, and most importantly at this stage of the summer, the first pre-season minutes of the 2026/27 campaign are safely in our players’ legs. There isn’t a huge amount more information available from the game and I’m not going to manufacture analysis where there is none, but I think there’s plenty there for us to be encouraged by, particularly when you remember this was Arsenal’s first pre-season game and Crystal Palace’s third. And if there’s one thing I want you to take away from this as we start following Arsenal through pre-season, it’s the phrase we’ve kept coming back to. Don’t overreact, but pay attention. There will be things worth questioning over the next few weeks. There’ll absolutely be things to get excited about. There might even be things that will be worth worrying about. But let’s wait until we actually have some evidence before deciding which is which. 

And Chloe. Chloe Kelly. Less than 48 hours after I spent part of my Friday night being told on social media that you contribute nothing, you go and score Arsenal’s first pre-season winner. I know that doesn’t prove anything. I know it’s only pre-season. But let me have this one.

Welcome back, Chloe.