Sam Kerr scored twice against Tottenham to put Chelsea tantalisingly close to retaining their Women’s Super League title on Wednesday. With one game left to play, against Reading on Sunday, and a two point gap to second-placed Manchester City (who travel to West Ham) the league is the Blues’ to lose.
Kerr took time to settle at Chelsea, having joined in January 2019 from Chicago Red Stars, but her double in a sunny then torrential Barnet means she has scored 20 goals in 21 WSL games to move two goals clear of Arsenal’s Vivianne Miedema in the race for the golden boot (Spurs have scored 17 goals his season).
For context, in five back-to-back golden boot-winning seasons in the US and Australia (2017-18 and 2018-2019 in the W-League and 2017, 2018 and 2019 in the NWSL) Kerr broke the records for the most goals scored in a season for both leagues, 18 in the US and 16 in Australia.
Despite the poor form of Tottenham, who have not won in the league since 17 January, this game could easily have been tricky for Chelsea. The sky-high intensity of their Champions League semi-final with Bayern Munich could have told in their legs three days later. However, the beauty and success of this quadruple-chasing team is that regardless of who is on the pitch their slick, relentless and ruthless streak remains.
Emma Hayes made five changes to the team that played on Sunday, with Jonna Andersson, Erin Cuthbert, Beth England, Guro Reiten and Chelsea’s longest-serving player, Drew Spence, called up.
Spurs made five changes too, with Chloe Peplow, Esther Morgan, Lucy Quinn, Siri Worm and Angela Addison all in, but they have had time to prepare, not having played in 11 days. Yet it was the visiting team that dominated.
But they struggled to break the deadlock as their former goalkeeper Becky Spencer kept things tight.
In the first 20 minutes she had more touches than any of her teammates, getting behind a Spence header, pushing out a Niamh Charles header and stopping a rasping effort from Sophie Ingle to her right.
Hayes paced around but was uncharacteristically quiet and looked confident. Shortly before half-time the patience of her team was rewarded as a free kick was played back to centre-back Millie Bright who floated the ball over the top to Reiten at the far post, the Norwegian nudged it quickly across the face of goal to Kerr, who was there to poke in at the far post.
They would quickly get the better of Spencer again in the second half. The keeper did brilliantly to paw away Kerr’s header from a Reiten cross but she could do nothing to stop Kerr’s close-range follow-up volley.
from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2RtKCjI
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