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Thrilling finish to WSL season in store after Man City prove too strong for Chelsea

Thrilling finish to WSL season in store after Man City prove too strong for Chelsea - Getty Images/Gareth Copley
Thrilling finish to WSL season in store after Man City prove too strong for Chelsea - Getty Images/Gareth Copley

Manchester City took the first step towards delivering on head coach Gareth Taylor’s demand to win all seven remaining matches when they beat defending Women's Super League champions Chelsea.

The crucial victory over Emma Hayes’s team has now set up an intriguing run-in. Taylor feels the title is “still Chelsea’s to lose”, but says his team’s win has “opened it up” at the top. On the latter point, he is certainly not wrong. Scarcely has the women’s game had a more open, closer-fought race for the crown. Just three points now separate the top four and for City, it is now a case of one down, six to go.

However, even maximum points might still not be enough for City, because technically their hopes of winning the league remain out of their hands, despite having moved level on points with leaders Manchester United, who also require results elsewhere to go their way.

Either of the Manchester clubs – who meet on the penultimate weekend of the season – could now win all of their remaining six games yet still not win the league. Such is the extremely close nature of this engrossing, four-way title race, it is still Chelsea and Arsenal, the teams now in third and fourth, who can both say that mathematically their chances are in their own hands.

Both have a game in hand, and Arsenal still have pivotal fixtures to come against all three of the other challengers. That said, psychologically the win for City is a major fillip, and they will now have huge belief that they can go all the way and win their first WSL title since 2016.

Taylor knew the significance of the result, saying post-match that he felt Chelsea would have won the league if they had won this game. “That’s not to say that they still won’t, but if we’d lost today that would have been five points with a game in hand – at this stage of the season, I think that’s really too much," he said.

“Now what it’s done is really open it up. The girls were under no illusion today. We had to win, and fair play to them. They deserve huge credit.”

Chelsea, who won away at the home of European champions Lyon on Wednesday and therefore had a much shorter recovery time than City, were undone by two well-taken finishes from first Filippa Angeldahl and then Lauren Hemp, with goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger well beaten by both.

Such was Hayes’s concern, she made a double substitution after 36 minutes. They were not able to turn things around, though, and there were several glum faces in the west London team’s camp throughout the afternoon. The Chelsea manager felt her team looked “sluggish”, but added: “I don’t think people realise how tough it is to come up here with our third away game in seven days; really, really tough.”

On her team’s title chances – as they seek to win a record fourth title in a row – Hayes said: “It’s the same as it’s been all along, which is we’ve still got a game in hand, we need to maximise that, and I think it’s fantastic for the league that it’s like this.”

It is a title race that could genuinely go any one of four ways over the next two months.