'Riding the wave' - Lionesses striker Alessia Russo explains how she survived Arsenal goal drought to enter winter break on huge high

The England international was on target in the Gunners’ 3-2 Champions League win over Bayern Munich. Said effort was her sixth through four outings in December. Russo now has 11 goals for the season – with 10 of those recorded since Renee Slegers replaced Jonas Eidevall as Arsenal coach in October.

Prior to that, Lionesses star Russo had gone eight matches without hitting the net – including her first five WSL appearances of the season – but is now in red-hot form and cursing the fact that the winter break has been reached.

Reacting to her serious purple patch, Russo told DAZN: "As strikers you always have moments and spells. It’s about riding the wave and when things aren’t good it’s stripping it back, focusing on training and that’s what I have done. I’m my own biggest critic and I know at times I have definitely not scored as much as I want to.

"We’re playing really nice football and we are picking up really important results. We are really enjoying ourselves and finding so many different connections on the pitch and often grinding out results in different kinds of ways. We’ve been working on lots of different things, but in the final third how we can find different connections, how we can create different types of attacks. It starts in training and we have been lucky enough to find it in matches too. It’s been great and us as players want more, we want to take accountability and that’s what we’re doing."

Russo, who will be looking to help England defend their European Championship crown in 2025, will be hoping to pick up where she left off when Arsenal return to action on January 12 in an FA Cup fourth round clash with Bristol City.