It will be a day of joy and celebration for the jubilant Chelsea team as they finish the WSL 1 season away at Liverpool Ladies. The newly crowned champions secured the title on Tuesday night as they put in a professional performance to beat Bristol City Ladies 2-0 and get the three points when all that was needed was the one.
The final game of the season will signal the end of a number of the Chelsea player’s careers. Freshly following the news of captain Katie Chapman’s retirement, it was also announced that Claire Rafferty would be departing the club after a fantastic ten year stint in which she battled a couple of terrible ACL injuries but came back stronger each time to become a vital part of the squad. Sunday afternoon will also be Eniola Aluko’s last game for the club as she moves on to pastures new after struggling to break in to the starting line up as of late.
Chelsea will want to complete an ‘invincibles’ league season having yet to be beaten so far. Their record stands at twelve wins and five draws and they have conceded the least amount of goals in the league with their goals against tally at just 11 goals all season. To top off an already historic season with an unbeaten league campaign would be stuff dreams are made of.
Liverpool were battling it out for third place in the league at the turn of the year, however some patchy form since March has seen their season dwindle into a premature and anticlimactic end. The Merseyside club have only won one of their last four games and that run has led to them falling down to 6th place, with Reading and Birmingham overtaking them in the standings. Being the home side this weekend, Liverpool will want to give their fans a nice a send off as a show of appreciation for their support throughout the season and there is also the extra incentive of putting a dampener on the champions celebrations.
This will be the fourth time the clubs will take each other on this season and the omens look good for the Blues who have won all three previous encounters. In fact, in those three games Chelsea have scored nine goals while only conceding one, so Liverpool will have a huge task on their hands to overturn this formidable Chelsea side.
