Chelsea Women will parade all four of their recent season’s trophies at Kingsmeadow ahead of their Sunday lunchtime match against West Ham... but there’s a fragility creeping into a team who swept almost everything before them last year.
Convincingly winning the Women’s FA Cup against Arsenal at Wembley means that it now joins the Community Shield, League Cup and WSL trophy for an airing that can only act as an added incentive to the Irons to turn up the heat.
A stuttering performance against Juventus and a surprise 1-0 defeat at Reading in the league have left the Blues on the back foot. To go two matches in a row without scoring, despite having your top strike team on the pitch, is baffling.
To be fair, Reading played out of their skins, with goal-line clearances and desperate (but effective) bodies-on-the-line defending earning the Royals their much-needed win.
Maybe Chelsea have started to run out of puff? One thing that is looking increasingly unlikely this season is the prospect of manager Emma Hayes’ dream of European glory being fulfilled.
Barcelona are in such red-hot form that the Blues, on their current showing, are likely to buckle under that onslaught if the teams find themselves drawn against each other in the knockout rounds next year.
In a way, the long winter break in the women’s game (they don’t return to action until Chelsea host Spurs on 9 January) comes at a bad time for Hayes, who wants to swiftly address the failings of coupling maximum possession with an inability to take chances.
Headers flew wide, shots were agonisingly close, but the superstars of Chelsea couldn’t break down a Reading team who celebrated at the end as if they’d won the lottery. Will the Blues get other chances to overhaul Arsenal in the league? Possibly, but it’s going to be tighter than anyone imagined just a week or two ago.
The views expressed in this blog are those of the author and unless specifically stated are not necessarily those of Hammersmith & Fulham Council.
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