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# Brighton 0-1 Arsenal Women: What We Learned From the WSL Opener
- URL: https://www.arsenalwomentrailblazers.com/brighton-0-1-arsenal-women-wsl-match-review/
- Published: 2026-09-06T22:48:43.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-06T22:48:43.000Z
- Description: Arsenal left Brighton with three points and a clean sheet, but the 1-0 scoreline only tells part of the story.
- Author: Roberto Revilla
- Tags: Match Reports, Latest, Arsenal Women News

I've now had time to think about Arsenal Women's opening game of the season and I'm still not sure if I'm pleased, relieved, slightly frustrated or a combination of all three, because if you'd offered me three points and a clean sheet away at Brighton before kick-off I'd obviously have snatched them from you, especially when you remember that we only got one point from this fixture last season and then Brighton came to the Emirates and beat us in the FA Cup. They seem to make life irritatingly difficult for us and they did it again on Sunday. 

Although I will admit that somewhere around the fifteenth minute, with Lisa Baum having just scored that frankly ridiculous goal and Arsenal moving the ball around in some of those combinations we'd spent all of pre-season watching, I was feeling rather pleased with myself for predicting 4-1\. I thought we were beginning to see where the afternoon was going, Brighton had survived the opening exchanges but we were winning the ball back quickly, Georgia Stanway was getting involved in absolutely everything and Lisa was making her first WSL start at just 19 years old look like a walk in the park (literally).

But then the game changed, not dramatically and not because Arsenal suddenly became terrible; Brighton just started finding their way through the game. They realised there was space outside our defensive shape, particularly with Seike on their right, Fran Kirby began getting more opportunities to influence things and gradually that feeling that Arsenal were about to score another one disappeared. By the second half I wasn't wondering if my 4-1 prediction was going to come true anymore, I was wondering if we could just keep the football for longer than a few seconds.

Which is probably why the final whistle felt more like relief than celebration.

But then you look at what we've come away with. We've gone to a ground where we dropped two points last season, against a team playing their first game under a new manager we'd had virtually nothing to analyse, we kept a clean sheet and took three points back to London. Brighton's own report describes them as growing into the game and controlling more possession after Baum's goal, then coming out quickly again after the break, so that uncomfortable feeling I had wasn't me having my usual Arsenal-induced nervous breakdown in front of the TV. They really did make this difficult. 

Maybe that's where I am with it the morning after. I don't think we played especially well for ninety minutes, I certainly don't think we controlled the match in the way Renée would have wanted and there are several things I want to go back and look at properly because some of what worried me in real time might look completely different when I can actually see the shape rather than following the ball. But opening weekends are a bit strange anyway, Brighton were always going to have that little bit of new manager bounce, and we were trying several things in a competitive match that we've only really seen in pre-season until now.

So no, it wasn't the opening-day statement I thought we might be watching after Lisa scored. But it is three points.

For a two point net gain, I'm prepared to live with Arsenal being slightly less impressive than I'd hoped if the league table in 9 months time ends up being two points better off because of it.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-5.jpg)

### **So what actually changed after the goal?**

I've gone back over this a few times because in my notes during the match there's an obvious moment where the tone changes. For the first twenty minutes or so I'm writing about Arsenal winning the ball back quickly, combinations from pre-season appearing everywhere, Lisa Baum coming inside, Mariona moving around, Georgia dropping deep, the full-backs getting forward, and then somewhere around the half-hour mark I'm writing, basically, Brighton are back in this and I don't like it. Which made me wonder if Brighton actually changed something after the goal, or if Arsenal simply stopped doing what had been working.

The answer is it's probably a bit of both.

That opening period was really interesting. We weren't playing with two fixed wingers in the way you might expect when you see Lisa Baum and Olivia Smith on the team sheet. Lisa started on the left and Livvy on the right, then they'd swap, Lisa would come inside, Mariona would drift across, Ona and Fox would provide the width and underneath all of that Georgia Stanway was dropping incredibly deep to collect the ball back and get us started again. There were times when she was almost joining Leah and Steph in the defensive line, which then allowed Steph to move wider and Ona to disappear off up the pitch, and if you've listened to the episodes we did during pre-season you'll recognise all of this because we've been watching Renée experiment with these rotations for weeks.

And for a while Brighton didn't really know what to do with it.

Their press was quite different to ours because when they came towards the player with the ball it was generally one player chasing, but when Arsenal lost it we were immediately surrounding whoever had possession. Sometimes two players, sometimes three, and that was why there were so many occasions early on where Brighton would finally get the ball away from their box and about five seconds later we'd have it again. Their own match report describes Arsenal reacting quickly after Seike's early chance and then Brighton having to find their rhythm after Baum scored, which is pretty much how it felt watching it back.

The warning had actually arrived before our goal though, because Nnadozie went long, Seike got into the space behind us and suddenly she was through on Misa. Ona did brilliantly to recover and make the angle more difficult, Misa made a fantastic save and I think Arsenal fans watching everywhere must have breathed a collective sigh of relief that we didn’t go one down so early.

And Brighton kept going back to that pattern of play, particularly down that side. Seike was finding space on their right and Brighton's report specifically mentions their counterattack repeatedly threatening us there, so this wasn't simply something that stood out to me because I had already circled Seike's name before kick-off. Brighton found the spot they could hurt us and once they realised it, they kept applying the pressure there.

Which takes me back to Ona, because when I profiled her after she signed in the summer one of the things I talked about was the space she can leave behind when she bombs forward. That's not a criticism of Ona because I guess Renée isn't standing on the touchline shouting at her to stop attacking. We want her up there, this whole system seems designed to get our full-backs involved high up the pitch, but if Ona goes then somebody has to look after what she's left behind, and quite often yesterday that somebody was Steph Catley.

This is where I'm beginning to understand why the match felt increasingly uncomfortable without Arsenal ever completely losing control of it, because the same things that made us look so exciting in the opening twenty minutes were also giving Brighton something to attack once they got through that first wave of pressure. We'd commit players, lose the ball and suddenly Seike was looking at a lot of space.

There were other little things as well. We started giving the ball back to them too easily when we were trying to play out, Steph had a couple of moments where I thought she was living slightly dangerously and the middle became incredibly congested, which made some of those lovely quick combinations we'd seen earlier much harder to pull off. Brighton became more compact, more confident and by the end of the half we weren't moving them around in anything like the same way.

But even then, we should have gone in 2-0 up. Livvy does brilliantly to stay strong, gets the ball across to Russo and Alessia puts it over, then later Georgia sends her through and Nnadozie comes out and makes the save. Brighton were growing into the game, but Arsenal were still creating the better chances.

So what changed after Lisa's goal wasn't that Arsenal suddenly stopped working. Brighton just started to work us out a bit.

The might be something we're going to have to get used to with this version of Arsenal, because if we're going to play with more movement, more aggressive full-backs and this determination to win the ball back immediately rather than retreating back into shape, there are going to be moments when someone gets through it and we suddenly look exposed.

But yesterday we had Misa Rodriguez behind the defence. Which, as it turned out, was very useful.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-2-1.jpg)

### **Georgia Stanway has changed the way Arsenal can build**

I want to spend a bit of time on Georgia Stanway because if you only watched the game casually yesterday, Lisa Baum is the player you'd be talking about, understandable because she scored *that* goal and seemed to spend most of her first WSL start behaving as though that was all perfectly normal, but the player name I kept writing down in my notes as the game progressed was Georgia Stanway, because every time I looked at where Arsenal were starting another move from, there she was.

At one point during the first half the graphic came up showing that Georgia had already had sixty touches, with Leah Williamson next on forty-four, and I remember thinking, well, there it is, because that's what I'd been watching throughout pre-season and what we talked about when we profiled her after she signed. She isn't simply sitting alongside Kim Little waiting for the ball to arrive in midfield. She's going looking for it, sometimes dropping deep to join the back line, and that changes what everyone around her is able to do because Steph and Leah can move wider, Ona and Emily can go higher and suddenly Arsenal aren't trying to get from defence to midfield in exactly the same way every time.

By full-time she'd made a Player of the Match-winning 114 passes, becoming the first midfielder to complete more than 100 passes on her WSL debut for a club, which is one of those stats that sounds crazy until you think back to the match and realise it describes what we were watching really well. Georgia was constantly available; to her centre backs, backing up Kim, helping Mariona to play more advanced and to team up with the wingers and full backs. If Brighton closed the shorter route, Georgia was looking up to try and put someone in behind instead.

That last bit is important because Renée specifically talked about it afterwards. She said Arsenal pride themselves on progressing through the lines with those shorter passing combinations we've become used to, but they wanted something different as well, something that would make them less predictable, and that's what she believes Georgia gives them. She can play what Renée described as the “bigger” pass, sees those longer options and Renée thinks it's beginning to encourage other players to look for them as well. 

Which immediately made me think about Leah, because I wrote her name down several times yesterday for that exact reason. There was one lovely long diagonal towards Fox in the first half which didn't quite come off, another towards Lisa and then others where she was looking beyond Brighton rather than automatically finding the closest Arsenal shirt, and I wonder if that's going to become part of this as well. If Georgia starts making Arsenal more comfortable going long when the opportunity is there, perhaps the effect isn't simply what Georgia herself does with the ball. Maybe it changes what everybody else thinks is available too.

Renée also said something afterwards which I think explains some of what became messy yesterday, because she talked about needing to find the balance of *when* Arsenal should do it. Brighton were holding quite a high line, Arsenal had a lot of pace in the front four and so the temptation was to get the ball behind them quickly, but if you start seeing that pass every time you regain possession, eventually you're not controlling the game anymore, you're just exchanging attacks. Renée's own assessment is that finding that balance is the next step. 

I did recognise that in my match notes and that's probably why I found parts of the second half so frustrating. There were moments when I was begging Arsenal to keep the ball for a minute, not because I wanted us passing sideways for the sake of it, but because Brighton had built up momentum and sometimes the best way of dealing with that is simply to make them chase the ball for a bit. Instead we'd win it, look forward, lose it, chase back, win it again and off we'd go once more, and after about ten minutes of that I felt as like I needed a lie down.

So I’m going to tell you that we've not seen the finished version of this midfield yet, and after one league game it would be a worry if we had.

But I do think we've now got a much clearer idea of what Georgia Stanway was brought in to change - she's giving Arsenal another outlet and she has the ability dominate and knit the play together in all areas of the pitch.

A deserved player of the match performance.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-1-1.jpg)

### **Lisa Baum was the surprise. She probably shouldn't be anymore.**

Even though I'd put Lisa Baum in my predicted eleven (nailed that by the way) there was still a part of me that expected Olivia Smith and Chloe Kelly to start together in those wider positions once we actually got to the first WSL game. Cerci and Reuteler weren't even in the squad, which apparently wasn't injury related and something to do with making choices given squad size, but it meant that Lisa wasn't being eased into English football with a few minutes to go at the end of a certain win - she was starting away from home at nineteen years old in a fixture Arsenal haven't exactly found easy in recent seasons.

And then she did *that*.

I've watched the goal back several times now and my favourite bit is the moment where she seems to have taken herself too far to the left of goal. Leah and then Kim win the ball back, Lisa collects it centrally just ahead of halfway and starts running at Brighton, there are defenders around her and she just keeps carrying it across the box until we're thinking the angle is disappearing and the chance has gone, and then she absolutely hammers it with her left foot into the near top corner. It's one of those almost audacious goals where no player should take a shot from that position, which is why I'm sitting here talking about it and Lisa Baum is playing football for Arsenal.

But I don't want to spend this section talking about the goal because we can and will re-watch that time and again over the coming week, the more interesting thing for me was everything happening around it.

I'd wondered during pre-season what Lisa actually *was* in this Arsenal team, because calling her a winger doesn't seem right. She obviously plays wide and she started there yesterday, but within a few minutes she was coming inside to combine with Russo, drifting across towards Mariona and then swapping sides with Smith. At one stage in my notes I've got her on the right, then central, then on the left and then back inside again, and I'm not entirely sure whether that was all happening by instruction or whether Renée has simply given her the freedom to recognise where the space is and go and occupy it.

She's so smooth when she carries the ball. I noticed it in pre-season but it was even more obvious yesterday because Brighton were actually trying to stop her. There was one run in the second half where she glided past the first defender, went into the box and didn't quite connect with the finish properly. She looks so at ease when she's running with the ball. She's a tall, strong nineteen-year-old who can carry the ball at speed and somehow still looks like she's got time to decide what she's doing when she gets there.

Although the moment that probably told me most about why she started ahead of Chloe happened at the other end of the pitch.

Brighton get Seike away and Lisa tracks all the way back into our penalty area and takes the ball off her. I remember writing immediately, *this is why Baum started.* If Renée wants Ona flying forward, Mariona wandering into different areas and everyone rotating around each other, the player occupying that side can't disappear the moment Arsenal lose possession. Lisa didn't. She was part of the press, recovered enormous distances and then, as soon as we got the ball back, she was involved in the next attack.

Which makes the standing ovation from our away supporters when she came off just after the hour feel important, because this wasn't an Arsenal crowd getting excited about a young player because she'd scored a wonder goal. They'd watched the rest of her performance too.

I'm also trying not to get completely carried away because we've seen sixty-odd minutes of Lisa Baum in the WSL and it might be a bit premature to declare her the answer to everything. There will be games where those runs don't work, defenders will learn what she wants to do, she'll have afternoons where the spaces aren't there and Renée now has an absurd number of attacking players competing for these positions.

But I do wonder if Lisa starting was the surprise in Renée's team. I also wonder how you can even think about leaving her out of the next one.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-2.jpg)

### **Misa didn't have much to do. Except save the game.**

I think Misa Rodríguez might have had one of those goalkeeper performances where, if you look at the match as a whole, you could easily come away thinking she wasn't that busy, but if you remove two or three things she did from the game we'd probably be having a completely different conversation right now.

The obvious one comes before Lisa's goal, when Nnadozie goes long and suddenly Seike is through. Ona deserves a lot of credit because she realises what's happened, gets back quickly and manages to put enough pressure on Seike to narrow the angle, but it's still a really good chance and Misa dives right to save us. Emphasis on the word ***save*** because if Brighton go 1-0 up at that point, with all the energy of the opening day, a new manager and a crowd suddenly having something to get excited about, who knows what sort of game we end up watching.

There was another one later when Seike got in from a tighter angle and Misa dealt with it again, one enormous punch from a corner in the second half where she came through everybody and just got rid of the problem, and several moments where Brighton tried to put the ball into the space behind our defence and she was already coming out to deal with it. When you're trying to play with the defensive line Arsenal were using yesterday, you need a goalie behind it who's prepared to be decisive.

We spent a lot of the summer wondering what Arsenal were doing with the goalkeepers. Daphne is still coming back from surgery, Misa Rodriguez arrives having been a very established goalkeeper at Real Madrid, Anneke Borbe is here too and suddenly what looked like a settled position with two class goalkeepers competing has now become a three way shoot out for the no 1 shirt.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Misa Rodriguez has not come to Arsenal to warm the bench or be anyone’s back up. I know I might get a bit of backlash for what I’m about to say, but I feel if Daphne or Anneke were in goal for that game we don’t come away with the three points.

If we're going to push are full backs high, if Georgia is going to drop into the defensive line and allow everyone else to move around her, if our response to losing possession is going to be to swarm towards the ball rather than retreat, there will be occasions when an opposing attacker beats that pressure. We saw it yesterday. Seike did it frequently. Suddenly the goalkeeper isn't just standing there waiting for someone to take a shot, she's part of the defensive line behind a pretty adventurous system. And that’s before I even start talking about her amazing athleticism.

I also thought there was a point in the second half, when the game had become increasingly frantic and Arsenal couldn't keep possession for more than a few passes, where Misa started slowing things down herself. She'd get the ball, wait, organise everyone and start us off again, and I remember actually writing that she seemed to be trying to relieve some of the pressure from the back.

I absolutely love that about her. As much as she’s very vocal, there’s a calmness about her which we needed, because the rest of the match wasn't calm, and while Lisa Baum will quite rightly get the plaudits and Georgia Stanway got Player of the Match, Arsenal don't leave Brighton with three points unless Misa makes that first save.

When Daphne is fully recovered, she’s going to have a fight to get that number one shirt back off of Misa Rodriguez, that’s for sure.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-3.jpg)

**The second half became a game Arsenal couldn't quite calm down**

Going into the second half I want to be careful because I think there's a temptation after a game like this to look at Arsenal hanging on towards the end and work back from there, as though Brighton battered us for forty-five minutes and we were lucky to escape with the points, but I don't think that's what happened. I also don't think we ever really got the game back under control, until injury time.

Brighton started the half better, which was already annoying enough for me because Sky had decided that three minutes into it I no longer needed to watch the match I'd been watching and moved it to Sky Sports+ to make way for the men's football. I won't go off on that particular tangent now because we'll be here until next week, but once I'd had a fight with the Sky box and found the game again it was obvious that Brighton had just carried on from the way they ended the first half.

We still had moments. Lisa got to the byline and put a really dangerous ball across the six-yard box which Vanegas did brilliantly to clear, Little had an effort saved, Lisa drove into the area again and couldn't quite get hold of the shot, so it wasn't like Arsenal had stopped attacking. But there was something about the rhythm of the game that had changed and I kept writing the same thing in in my notes: we need to keep the ball.

Not that Brighton were keeping it either, which is why it was so uncomfortable to watch. It wasn't sustained Brighton possession with Arsenal trapped on the edge of our area for half an hour. We'd win it, lose it, they'd attack, we'd clear it, somebody would give it away again and off we'd go in the opposite direction, and after a while the whole thing began to feel like one big mistake would be the difference between us going two up or Brighton equalising.

Renée made the first attacking changes just after the hour, taking Lisa and Livvy off for Caitlin Foord and Chloe Kelly, and I understood it because both had put in a huge effort in that first hour and Brighton had begun to cope with them better. Vanegas in particular had done a really good job against Olivia, and suddenly she had Caitlin and Chloe to give her a completely different set of problems.

What surprised me was that it didn't really settle us. We had fresh legs and fresh attacking options but Brighton kept finding their way forward, Fran Kirby was becoming more involved and Seike was still the player I didn't want to see receiving the ball with space in front of her. Misa had to save from her again, Brighton had shots from distance and by about seventy-five minutes my notes deteriorated from tactical observations into variations of *this is getting a bit nervy now*.

Then Renée went the other way entirely and brought Stina on for Mariona.

Russo dropped deeper and suddenly we had Stina trying to stretch Brighton vertically, which made some sense given how aggressively they were beginning to chase us. Georgia immediately found her with one of those longer passes we'd been talking about and later Stina got through again and forced a fingertip save from Nnadozie, and I thought for a moment that might be how we finally kill the game. Brighton were committing more players forward in search of the equaliser, so eventually we had to get one of those transitions right and there'd be enough space for Stina to attack and convert.

But we didn’t and by the time I was writing that I wanted Smilla Holmberg on, and Fox moved to the left, I'd stopped worrying about a second goal and wondered how we were going to get through the last few minutes. Then Renée brought Smilla and Frida came on for Ona and Russo, Fox switched sides and Smilla immediately started doing what Smilla does best, bombing up and down the right flank causing trouble.

There were little opportunities after that. Foord kept causing problems, Smilla got forward, Stina was looking for space and Brighton were leaving more of it because they were throwing bodies forward, but the second goal never came and the final few minutes were all about concentration. Leah had already taken a yellow card earlier in the half to stop a counter, Kim took another one when Tvedten threatened to get away and I realised my score prediction didn’t matter anymore, we just needed to shut shop and get those three points on the bus home.

Which they did.

I don't think our substitutions transformed the game or restored the control we'd lost, because if anything Brighton remained dangerous right until the end. But the players Renee brought on gave Brighton different things to think about, Stina gave us somewhere to go when they pushed up, Smilla gave us fresh legs and aggression down the right side and Arsenal found a way through a period of the match where we weren't playing particularly well.

There will be days when I want considerably more than that from this team.

On the first weekend of the season, away at a ground where we drew last year, I'm not going to complain too loudly about learning that we can also win a match when it becomes a punching match.

Although I'd quite happily go the rest of the season without another final fifteen minutes like that.

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d2/b6/d2b6c83b-fa2f-458d-b44c-82aebbd18640/content/images/2026/09/Image-4.jpg)

**I'm not worried about Renée-ball. I am interested in the risk.**

I didn’t come away from this game worried about the system, but I do think we're possibly going to have to get used to moments in games where it makes us uncomfortable, because a lot of what caused Brighton problems yesterday was also connected to the things that allowed Arsenal to look so good early on. You can't ask Ona and Fox to get high, have Mariona moving around looking for spaces, allow Lisa and Livvy to switch positions, push players towards the ball the second possession is lost and then be surprised when an opposition attacker occasionally gets through.

That's the bit I want to keep watching out for.

During pre-season we talked a lot about Arsenal having more ways to attack teams this season, and yesterday gave us the first proper glimpse of what Renée meant. There wasn't one fixed route through Brighton. Sometimes Georgia dropped back to collect and we built through her, sometimes Leah looked to go long, sometimes the full-backs provided the width, sometimes Lisa and Olivia did, Mariona seemed to be all over the midfield and there were occasions when the positions on the team sheet became completely irrelevant.

But every decision you make to put another player somewhere useful when you've got the ball has a consequence when you haven't got it, and Brighton were good enough to work that out. They didn't need twenty passes to do it either. Quite often it was Kirby looking up, Seike or Olislagers moving into the space outside us and suddenly Arsenal were turning around and running towards their own goal.

Which is why the answer to yesterday isn’t that we need to be less adventurous. That defeats the purpose of everything Renée appears to be building. If you tell Ona not to go because Seike might attack the space behind her, you've solved one problem by removing one of the reasons we signed Ona Batlle in the first place.

It's more about recognising when the game needs something different.

There was a spell in the second half where I wanted us to be boring and play keep ball for five minutes. Brighton had momentum, their crowd was beginning to believe and every time we won back possession we were treating it like another invitation to attack. Sometimes you can just keep it. Make them chase you and let the match go quiet for a bit. Then start again.

That's where Georgia Stanway becomes even more important, because if she's going to be the player sitting underneath all those rotations, she might also become the person who decides when Arsenal need to stop playing at a hundred miles an hour. Kim already understands that instinctively. There were little moments yesterday where she won the ball, took the foul, moved us five yards, gave everyone a second to get back where they needed to be, and I suspect the more Georgia and Kim play together the more Georgia will learn to control the tempo of the overall game more.

We're also talking about the first competitive ninety minutes of the season, which feels worth remembering before anybody freaks out. There are new players everywhere, some of them have barely been at the club for five minutes, the combinations we've been getting excited about in pre-season were being tested against WSL opposition for the first time and Brighton weren't remotely interested in cooperating with my narrative of Arsenal's exciting new team.

Good. I much prefer we discover some of this now.

There was enough yesterday to see why the ceiling of this Arsenal team is considerably higher than it was last season, but there was also enough to remind us that having more options doesn't automatically mean knowing exactly which one to use in every moment.

That bit takes time, and if Arsenal can spend that time figuring it out while collecting three points away from home, I’m not going to complain too much about it.

That’s it for my first WSL match breakdown ever - I’d love your feedback because it helps me to know what I’m doing right, what I’m doing in my approach that you love and what I need to do better at. 

If you enjoyed this match review please do share it with another Arsenal supporting friend, and you can connect with me via email or over on Instagram.

We’ll look ahead to our first home game against Crystal Palace later this week. In the meantime take care, and keep trailblazing.