As Chelsea ready themselves to face a side who have for so long been the yardstick against which all other European clubs are measured, they might ask whether they are hitting their own standards, let alone the lofty ones that Barcelona continue to set.
Sonia Bompastor’s side are unbeaten in all competitions. They occupy one of the top four spots in the Champions League table that will guarantee them a quarterfinal berth with home advantage. The sky is hardly falling in. However, a 1-1 draw at Liverpool was a third draw in nine Women’s Super League games, one that allowed Manchester City to open up a three-point lead at the top of the table.
All four of those draws have been by the same scoreline, and of course, some 1-1 draws are different from others. It is one thing to get within three minutes of beating Arsenal at the Emirates Stadium, another to register just one shot on target against the league’s bottom side. Both, however, speak to a broader trend that has emerged early in year two under Bompastor, the sense that this team lacks the ruthless edge that could take it beyond the likes of Barcelona.
Certainly, they are not as free-scoring as past teams were. Their nine WSL games have delivered just 16 goals, exactly half of their tally at this stage of last season. Alyssa Thompson’s goals in back-to-back games have certainly been welcome, but she cannot cover the holes in an attack that is feeling the absences of Mayra Ramirez (hamstring), Lauren James (ankle) and Guro Reiten, who welcomed the birth of her son earlier this month. Their absence is all the more profoundly felt as Sam Kerr continues to work her way back after nearly two years on the sidelines.
No wonder this side is taking fewer shots and carving out more infrequent chances than it has in recent years, and by a fair margin, their 16.3 shots per game a 15 percent drop from last season’s side, who dropped as many points in all 22 games as this iteration have already in the WSL. And yet it is not quite as straightforward a tale of outright attacking drop off as the conflation of pure injuries and some off-color performances might suggest. The volume of openings Chelsea are making for themselves might have dropped. The quality of them has not.
If anything, Chelsea are making better chances for themselves. A rise from 2.06 non-penalty expected goals (npxG) per WSL game to 2.2 npxG might be nothing more than a bit of variance; that latter is a small sample size after all. It could also be the case, though, that the story of this season so far is nothing more than some bad form in front of goal at the wrong moments, leading 27 goals from almost 32 xG. Aggie Beever-Jones, Wieke Kaptein, Catarina Macario, Sjoeke Nusken, Reiten: all have notably fewer actual goals than expected. Given the quality of these footballers, it is hard to believe that that won’t change for most of them in the next few months.
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The worry coming out of the draw with Liverpool was that the data had it as a rather different game to the other 1-1s. This wasn’t Chelsea hammering on the door for 20-odd shots and three-ish xG as it had been against Twente and Manchester United. It was a team who didn’t really go anywhere for an hour against a team they would have expected to swat aside. No wonder Bompastor was keen to remind her players of what is expected after a bad result.
“At Chelsea, we are used to bouncing back really quickly,” she said. “It will be a tough challenge, but our job is to make sure we focus on the next one. We take the learnings from Sunday and we go into the next one ready to compete.”
That will certainly be a challenge against Barcelona, who sit atop the Champions League table with three wins from three, the only blemish on a winning season being a shock defeat at Real Sociedad. The Catalans might be strong favorites for this competition, but that defeat was a sign that they are not invulnerable. Rocked first by their defeat to Arsenal in May’s European final and then by La Liga salary limits that forced six exits to the WSL, they may not be quite the same team that beat Chelsea 4-1 home and away in last season’s Champions League semifinal.
They might not be the team they were last season, but the question heading into Thursday night is whether Chelsea are either. Are they a team unfortunate to have run into a cold streak in the early weeks of an injury-hit campaign, or one who don’t have the killer instinct to put to bed the worst team in the WSL? If it’s the latter, this could be a trying night at Stamford Bridge indeed.
Viewing information
- Date: Thursday, Nov. 20 | Time: 3 p.m. ET
- Location: Stamford Bridge — London, England
- Live stream: Paramount+
- Odds: Chelsea +450; Draw +450; Barca -188
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