You could be forgiven for assuming the Women’s Super League is a one-club show. Four league titles in a row, seven of the past nine (if you include the mini Spring Series of 2017), and three back-to-back doubles suggest a somewhat crushing dominance by Emma Hayes’s Chelsea.
To an extent that is true, the silverware doesn’t lie. However, cut a little below the surface and Chelsea’s dominance has been chipped away at. “This isn’t Arsenal Ladies from 10 to 25 years ago,” said Hayes when asked whether Chelsea’s winning run is good for the league. “This is a different situation. Leagues are not being won five, six, seven games in advance, they’re being won on the last day three years running. As much as it might look like that, it’s a league of margins and we’re the team that has narrowly managed to win it.”
In many ways that makes this fourth consecutive title all the more remarkable. This season, the gap between the champions and the rest has looked closer than ever. In fact, Chelsea have spent 95 days at the top of the table while their nearest challengers, Manchester United, have spent 105 days on top. How, then, have they made sure they were top when it mattered most?
The opening day of the season delivered one of the shocks of the season, when promoted Liverpool came from a goal behind, conceding to a Fran Kirby penalty in the third minute, to win 2-1, thanks to two Katie Stengel spot-kicks.
Chelsea had been through it before. The preceding season they lost to Arsenal on the opening day and went on to win the league. However, losing to a team outside the top three or four sides was an unexpected blow.
That was immediately followed by an impressive 2-0 defeat of Manchester City that would begin a 13-game unbeaten run to get their title defence back on track. That run would be punctuated by a five-week period without Hayes, who was forced to take time out to undergo an emergency hysterectomy as part of her treatment for endometriosis. Emerging from that time unscathed, while also navigating the intensity of Champions League group games in the format’s second season, was remarkable.
Ultimately, once again, the league was decided by the games between the top four – that is an improvement of sorts, with the dominance of Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester City ruptured by the rise of United. Chelsea collected 13 points from their three nearest rivals, compared with United’s eight, City’s seven and Arsenal’s four, critically doing the double over the runners-up, United. That gap is tighter, though. Last year Chelsea beat Marc Skinner’s side 6-1 and 4-2; this term a 3-1 away win was followed up by a more conservative 1-0 win at Kingsmeadow and the two were separated by a single Sam Kerr goal in the FA Cup final, too.
Hayes has had to lean on her squad depth throughout the season to maintain challenges on four fronts. The long-term absences of Kirby and Pernille Harder to injury disrupted the swagger they had displayed in previous campaigns. Chelsea were forced to be more dogged but that didn’t stop Hayes from handing playing time to more fringe players early on even if it meant further ruptures to their rhythm.
That is a critical part of how Hayes prepares her teams for the business end of the season. “We have only ever won the league by a couple of points at best, maybe a game somewhere along the line, so this is just business as usual for us,” she said after a comprehensive defeat of West Ham set up a tantalising penultimate match against Arsenal. “It’s what we had prepared for at the very beginning of the season. We are exactly where we want to be. We are in a position to control the outcome. Everybody, staff, players, has worked so hard to get to this point.”
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On how she makes the team even better for next season, she pointed to the significance of leaning on her squad again: “There isn’t a secret in it, I trust the squad. I use players across the season and as a result of that they’ve got confidence coming into this block when you need them. This is a victory for the whole squad. [Johanna] Rytting Kaneryd, that was her best game in a Chelsea shirt and they’re repaying the faith in them with the minutes we’re giving them and the team is growing as a result.”
Not everything has gone to plan. Chelsea looked devoid of solutions and tactically lacking in the 2-0 defeat by Manchester City that would end that 13-game unbeaten run. Kadeisha Buchanan, signed from the then European champions, Lyon, in the summer, struggled to get to grips with the intensity of the league.
However, the players have stepped up when it has mattered most, scoring 24 of their 66 goals in May while conceding once, and this league win will be all the sweeter for the adversity and intensity along the way.
