Having suffered plenty of past heartache at Barcelona’s expense, Chelsea may have ordinarily celebrated a 1-1 draw with them in the Women’s Champions League.<\/p>\n
But this was a missed opportunity.<\/p>\n
Chelsea were the better side on the night, dominating most of the first half and creating plenty of goalscoring opportunities.<\/p>\n
They led for eight minutes before failing to clear a corner and allowing Ewa Pajor to pounce on the loose ball, cancelling out Ellie Carpenter’s delicious opener.<\/p>\n
Australian Carpenter should have scored the winner too but dragged her close-range finish wide with 10 minutes to go and only the keeper to beat.<\/p>\n
It was perhaps in that moment manager Sonia Bompastor knew their chance to beat Barcelona had gone.<\/p>\n
Substitute Catarina Macario also had a goal ruled out for a marginal offside, and when the full-time whistle eventually went, the Blues boss shook her head in frustration as her side dropped to sixth in the league phase table – two points behind their Spanish visitors in first place.<\/p>\n
This was an impressive performance and a drastic improvement from their 8-2 aggregate defeat by Barcelona in last season’s semi-finals – but their lack of ruthlessness ultimately proved costly and denied them the victory they craved.<\/p>\n
“I think it is frustrating not to have won the game, especially when you look at the statistics and the chances we had,” said Bompastor. <\/p>\n
“We had opportunities to win so I’m frustrated for that reason, but overall there were also a lot of positives to take. <\/p>\n
“We know in the Champions League and in the important games we need to be clinical. We have spoken about that and my players are trying so hard. <\/p>\n
“I’m really pleased with the performance. Everyone worked hard and I think when we are playing at this level, we can put in performances like this one.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Having suffered plenty of past heartache at Barcelona’s expense, Chelsea may have ordinarily celebrated a 1-1 draw with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":274836,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-274835","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=274835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/274835\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/274836"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=274835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=274835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=274835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}