Sonia Bompastor insisted her Chelsea team have won nothing yet and said she will keep their feet on the ground after the defending champions continued their strongest ever start to a Women’s Super League season with a routine 3-0 victory at Liverpool.
With her side’s sixth league win out of six, Bompastor became the first manager to win their first four away games in the history of the WSL, and maintained a 100% record in all competitions after eight games while looking confident, attack-minded and self-assured.
“Even if it is maybe a perfect start for us in terms of results, points and performances, we didn’t win anything yet,” the Frenchwoman said. “So we need to keep the good balance between the confidence – which is really important for the players – but also keeping the head on the shoulders, and not flying or not being aligned with the reality. That’s my job, to make sure I maintain that balance.”
Their latest win was their second on Merseyside in successive Sundays, after the emphatic 5-0 victory at Goodison Park, and if Liverpool fans were looking for any consolations, they will have at least been glad they made this game significantly more of a contest that their neighbours Everton managed to.
Nonetheless, Sunday’s meeting on a grey afternoon in St Helens contrasted with the engrossing 4-3 thriller in which Liverpool stunned Chelsea towards the end of last season and, briefly, had prompted their then manager, Emma Hayes, to concede a title that they went on to win regardless.
Chelsea were never in such jeopardy this time. Unlike on that chaotic night in May, Chelsea were solid at set pieces and were not caught out by Liverpool’s pace on the break. But Bompastor said she had deliberately not wanted to dwell on the team’s most recent trip to face Liverpool, saying: “I think it’s a new era. We are in a different dynamic from last season.
“I didn’t talk with my players about last year’s performance against Liverpool. We talked a little bit as a staff about it. We were really focused on set pieces, because we knew it was one of their strengths. And I think we did well. We did concede some corners and free-kicks but we were really strong defensively.”
Mayra Ramírez opened the scoring with the Colombian’s third goal of the season in all competitions, moments after Johanna Rytting Kaneryd had struck the bar, and Guro Reiten capitalised on some slack home defending to double the lead shortly before half-time. Aggie Beever-Jones added the third with a close-range finish in the 90th minute.
Asked if she was surprised by her team’s winning start, the former Lyon manager Bompastor added: “I’m not surprised at all. I knew coming to Chelsea that I was going to manage a squad with a lot of talent. For me the main job is to make sure the players understand the way we want to play together and what I expect from them. At the moment, they have a lot of confidence.
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“For every game, I think our game-plan was very clear for the players and they knew what to expect from me and I knew what to expect from them. I think this vision and clarity gives confidence to the players.”
Liverpool had not lost at home to Chelsea since March 2019. This term, they are still winless at their new stadium, which they share with the St Helens rugby league side, since relocating from Tranmere’s Prenton Park.
The Liverpool manager, Matt Beard, said: “If you look at the players that we’ve got missing at the moment, we are really thin on the ground. [But] we don’t like losing games, it hurts.
“There are times when we’ve broken and we could have slid players through, especially against a team like Chelsea. They take more risks under Sonia than they did under Emma Hayes. I think they’re conceding 11 shots on average per game. Arsenal had 20 shots against them, so it’s those moments.
“But that’s a learning curve for our younger players. We’re young at the top end of the pitch. We just have to make sure we’re better in those decisive moments.”
