Leicester vs Chelsea - Press Conference

Ahead of Chelsea’s fixture away at Leicester, Sonia Bompastor spoke on her current squad by giving us injury updates and preparation for the winter break.

Injury updates within the squad…

“Maelys and Julia won’t be involved in the game tomorrow. Julia was able to practice this morning, but not normally. Maelys won’t be involved in the Real Madrid game either. She will be coming back in January. Sandy Baltimore won’t be involved in the game tomorrow, but she can probably be in the squad for the game against Real Madrid.” “LJ is progressing really well, we are talking with the staff about her return. It is always a little bit difficult sometimes because you want them back but you also want to protect them and not take too many risks. So I think for LJ we will see her after the winter break in January.” “We are working really hard with her(Catarina Macario), making sure she comes back healthy on the pitch and she's able to play more and more games building fitness and chemistry in the team.”

Winter break plans?

“After the break, we will go to Portugal to Algarve. We will have a small camp over there, 5 days to prepare for the second half of the season.”

Expectations from Leicester…

“I know Amandine (Leicester manager) quite well, we have both been involved in the French league and both new coaches in the WSL. For sure shes struggling a bit with her squad because she's had many injuries, she's struggling a bit with scoring goals but as a coach when it is sometimes difficult to score goals you just secure your defensive part of the game and actually the results in the last games are good for them so will bring them a little bit more confidence. Also defensively they are well organised and they as a team defend really well so we expect that tomorrow.” “We need to analyse  (Leicester's) performance rather than the result sometime and when we look at their performance, they had good results the past few weeks and I think the performance was really giving them confidence.”

Timetabling

“It is important for Chelsea to have depth within the squad, especially for this reason. When you play champions league and league, they are quick turnarounds between the games. It's not even sometimes three days, it's only two days to recover. So it's important to have fresh players coming in and having the opportunity to show.”

Goal Difference within the wsl table…

“It's a game where you have 3 points, so it doesnt change from the other ones. But of course in any game our main focus is to put all the chances in our side to win the game…We want to be an efficient team, sometimes when I talk about having a dominant team in the league, in some games we have so many opportunities to score. If you reflect on the Twente one I think we scored 6 goals, but we could have scored more and that's really important and also to have this mentality. So I’m not saying tomorrow it will be easy, we are not expecting that but if we have the opportunity to create chances we have to be efficient and score them.”