Daphne van Domselaar: How crosswords became a vital part of Arsenal’s pre-match preparations

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Before Daphne van Domselaar and her team-mates left London for this Saturday’s Women’s Champions League final against Barcelona in Lisbon, there was something vital she had to pack.

Her goalkeeper gloves? Her boots? No, much more important for the Arsenal ‘keeper were her crosswords — and a pencil, of course, to ensure things don’t get messy.

“We have a ritual now of always bringing crosswords on the coach for away games, or if we’re staying over somewhere,” Van Domselaar tells The Athletic days before she and her team-mates have to figure out arguably the toughest puzzle in women’s football: how to beat holders Barcelona in Europe’s showpiece event?

“We can’t go to a game without playing crosswords,” the 25-year-old, a self-confessed “bit of a nerd”, adds. The ‘we’ are fellow goalkeeper Naomi Williams and some of Arsenal’s backroom staff.

“Even though we always have them here (at the training ground) so we never forget, I’m like ‘S***, we forgot the crosswords’ and have to run back in to get them. Against Lyon (in the semi-final), we were away for two days so we couldn’t go without them. I said to security, ‘Give me one minute, I need to go back, don’t let the coach go’.”

As she does the crosswords in her second language, Van Domselaar admits 20-year-old Londoner Williams is the better of the two, but that they make a good team when completing puzzles together. Transferring such teamwork from the page to the training pitch has been key to Van Domselaar having an impressive debut season in north London.

Van Domselaar celebrates victory over Lyon with her team-mates (Catherine Steenkeste/Getty Images)

Arriving from Aston Villa in the summer after suffering a season-ending hip injury, the Dutch international had to wait until the end of September for her Arsenal debut, which came against Leicester City in the Women’s Super League (WSL), a match the Gunners won 1-0.

Though vying with Williams and the then-established No 1 Manuela Zinsberger for a starting spot, Van Domselaar has received support from both.

“When Manu came running to me at full-time on my debut away to Leicester, jumping in my arms, that’s something I still remember really clearly,” she says. “The first day I met Manu she said, ‘If you need anything, I’ll always help you, so reach out’.

“She just made me feel really comfortable. We matched quite well because she’s really open. It’s always hard to work with someone that is not playing because of you, and that’s really clear as a goalkeeper, but we talk openly about that. If we know I’m playing, she will do anything to make me feel good enough. She’ll give me her view of the game and on game days it’s just a little bit extra to take care of me.”

Jonas Eidevall was still head coach when she signed, with Renee Slegers, who became permanent head coach in January, the team’s individual development coach.

“Even when she wasn’t head coach, she was always really encouraging,” Van Domselaar says of her compatriot. “I was injured and she was saying, ‘We have a lot of trust in you, but you should trust in yourself too. Be confident’.

“When she was named head coach, she gave me another level of confidence. She’s so supportive and wants to get involved in your personal life in terms of who you are, where you’re coming from, how you are as a person and why you act the way you do. She invests a lot of effort in being a coach but also someone you can go to.”

The confidence Slegers instils in her players has been evident since she took interim charge in October.

Van Domselaar makes a save in the closing minutes of the quarter-final second leg match against Real Madrid (Adrian Dennis/AFP via Getty Images)

Arsenal’s comeback win at home over Real Madrid in the Champions League quarter-finals stands out as one of the best examples of that. Still 2-0 down on aggregate at half-time of the second leg, one of Slegers’ most consistent qualities shone through as Van Domselaar made one of her favourite saves of the season to keep her team level on the night before the break.

“If you look at her, she’s a calm person,” Van Domselaar says. “That calm gives us a lot of trust and confidence. She showed us we can be really good and we have to have confidence in ourselves to change the game.

“She showed us some clips (at half-time) and said, ‘We’re so close, just tweak this and you’ll be fine. Believe in yourselves’ and that calmness paid off within a minute of the second half. You could be like, ‘Oh s***, we only have 45 minutes to score three goals’ but she was the opposite.”

Forty-one seconds after the restart, Alessia Russo put Arsenal ahead on the night. Mariona Caldentey’s header levelled the tie three minutes later before Russo improbably put Arsenal 3-0 ahead on the night in the 59th minute and en route to the last four.

But Van Domselaar also played a crucial role in the team’s progress. In added time, Real Madrid’s Linda Caicedo was bearing down on goal and looked certain to force the match into extra time, only for Arsenal’s goalkeeper, standing tall, to bat her shot away. Goal prevented, progress secured.

That quarter-final tie also displayed how Van Domselaar’s job has changed since she joined from Villa, a team which finished seventh in the WSL in the 2023-24 season, 26 points behind third-placed Arsenal.

Playing a similar number of games for both teams (she played 15 times for Arsenal this season, 14 for Villa the season prior) she faced almost half the number of shots on target (42 to 81) and made significantly fewer saves (32 to 51) in Arsenal red. Such statistics are to be expected given the quality of the respective teams but, impressively, Van Domselaar finished the WSL season with the second-best shots-saved percentage in the league (81 per cent) and best clean-sheet-to-games-played ratio in the league (66.7 per cent).

“I like that you can be a hero a bit more here,” she says. “It’s important to be focused for 90 minutes to make that save in the last minute, but I enjoy being part of the play more than just being a goalkeeper.

“I try to keep my mind on the game when I’m doing nothing, so I can still be somewhat involved even if it doesn’t look like I am. I’m quite high on the pitch even in build-up, and I’m quite focused on coaching on the pitch to make sure defenders are in the right place.”

Van Domselaar made vital saves in the semi-final second leg against Lyon, but a better indication of her overall contribution in that match, which Arsenal won 4-1 for a 5-3 aggregate score, was that she made more passes (44) than any Lyon player.

Ahead of the season, Van Domselaar spoke about wanting to take an “adventure to the unknown” and said winning the Champions League would be “her biggest dream ever”. But back then, it was just aspiration, hope even, especially when Arsenal’s first game of the group phase was a 5-2 loss away at Bayern Munich, Eidevall’s departure coming soon after.

Now, she is one game away from turning a dream into reality, albeit against a formidable Barcelona team that thrashed WSL champions Chelsea 8-2 on aggregate in the semi-finals and have scored 44 goals on the way to this season’s final at the Jose Alvalade Stadium.

“It’s crazy. If you told me a couple of years ago that I would be in a Champions League final, I would have said that’s a joke,” she says. “I slowly built into the team throughout the season and I personally feel I’ve done really well.

“We’ve grown in the Champions League. We had a rough time starting the group phase and despite winning all our group games after, it never got easy for us. Being able to pull it off against Lyon was really special and we’re in the final now, so we just want to win it.

“At the same time, I can’t be that excited yet because I really want to win that trophy.”

(Top photo: Catherine Steenkeste/Getty Images)

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