won a domestic treble<\/a>, as they cruised to victory with a hat-trick from Johanna Rytting Kaneryd and two goals from an in-form Sam Kerr, setting up a semi-final at Manchester City in January. For the home side, this was a new low in a dismal first half of their campaign.<\/p>\nGareth Taylor, the Liverpool manager, said his team \u201cwere punished today for all the errors we made\u201d, adding: \u201cWe were naive in some of our play and gifted them goals. You can\u2019t do that against a team like Chelsea.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe levels were off, and then when you don\u2019t perform to an acceptable level of sprinting, competing, reacting, then obviously you\u2019re going to make it really difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
It took just 13 minutes for Chelsea to take the lead. Niamh Charles\u2019s low ball into the box found Kerr, who darted in front of her marker with ease and found the near, bottom corner.<\/p>\n
If Taylor was frustrated at a lack of pressure on the ball for the first goal, Chelsea\u2019s second, just four minutes later, will have infuriated him further. His team gave away possession inside their own defensive third and allowed Kerr to finish neatly.<\/p>\n
It was three when Wieke Kaptein turned smoothly on the edge of the box and lashed in a good finish. Aggie Beever-Jones\u2019s effort made it 4-0. The only sour note for Chelsea came when the England striker had to be withdrawn with a potential injury before half-time. Sonia Bompastor explained it was an ankle problem, saying: \u201cHopefully it won\u2019t be too bad, but it doesn\u2019t look great at the moment.\u201d<\/p>\n
Aggie Beever-Jones scores her team\u2019s fourth goal before going off injured. Photograph: Ben Roberts Photo\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
In the second half, Rytting Kaneryd began to steal the show, curling in a beauty from distance. Jenna Clark did claw one back for Liverpool from close range but any respite was brief, with Rytting Kaneryd\u2019s deflected effort making it 6-1 just moments later. Sjoeke N\u00fcsken and Millie Bright added further goals for the visitors either side of Rytting Kaneryd completing her treble.<\/p>\n
Liverpool could scarcely win the ball off the holders and they were slow to react to second balls, most notably as N\u00fcsken\u2019s left-footed shot came back off the crossbar and Rytting Kaneryd was the first to reach the rebound for her hat-trick. In the stands, the atmosphere among the home supporters was increasingly dejected. Surprisingly, the majority of the 2,467 crowd stayed until the end. Taylor\u2019s expression was downbeat, to say the least. His players\u2019 body language even worse.<\/p>\n
Bottom of the league and now emphatically out of the League Cup, pressure will be higher than ever on the former Manchester City coach, who was appointed in August and has not yet overseen a league win.<\/p>\n
His injury-depleted squad meant he could name only five substitutes compared with Chelsea\u2019s nine, and he said recruiting players in January would be \u201creally important\u201d.<\/p>\n
Taylor said: \u201cI always like to think logically and it\u2019s really tough to be super, super critical because we\u2019re working tremendously hard here to improve this thing. But there are a lot of things we need in order to be able to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n
He felt this had been \u201ca game too far\u201d for his side. Asked what his message had been to his players after the game, Taylor, who was calm and did not seem angry with his team, said: \u201cJust that we\u2019re trying to get help.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Humiliated, humbled and, frankly, embarrassed, it was probably a relief for Liverpool when the clock reached 90:00 and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":360139,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[440],"tags":[49,48,561,82],"class_list":["post-360138","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360138","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=360138"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/360138\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/360139"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=360138"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=360138"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=360138"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}