This was a big occasion for women’s football: the first FA Cup final to take place at Wembley, where a warm afternoon added to the sense that here was a game basking in its moment. Beforehand, players from Chelsea and Notts County had talked about how special it would be to finally walk on to that turf in front of a record crowd to compete for a trophy that neither side had won before.
Immediately after their win, however, Chelsea allowed themselves to imagine the rest of the season in a haze of ticker tape. “Of course I want them to enjoy it,” said the manager, Emma Hayes, “[but] winning gives you a taste. I’m pretty certain that they’ll wake up and say: ‘We want the next one.’”
Since the Women’s Super League is played out of step with other competitions (running from April to October), the FA Cup winners are still fighting on three fronts: they are third in the league with five games to go and only one point to make up on the leaders, Sunderland; they have a winnable game in hand against Watford in the group stages of the Continental Cup; and, as last season’s WSL runners-up, they will compete in the knockout phases of the women’s Champions League later this year.
“I choose to be at a club like Chelsea because I want that kind of pressure,” Hayes said. “That’s what we expect every year, that we’re competing for four trophies.”
There was little doubt, once Saturday’s final settled into its rhythm, that Chelsea were going to claim their first. County’s front three of Ellen White, Rachel Williams and Jess Clarke are happy marauders on their day, but this was not going to be it; Rick Passmoor’s County side ceded the midfield and Chelsea’s own trio – Eni Aluko, Ji So-yun and Gemma Davison – tormented the backline.
Aluko had earned her player of the match award before the referee had even started looking at her watch to call for half-time, delivering dangerous balls from both wings before a twisting jaunt down the left put her in position to set up a close-range finish for Ji. “We could have locked her in the changing room,” Passmoor said when asked how County could have coped with Aluko. “The best team won, let’s be honest. We’ll learn from it.”
County did not even exist two years ago, so for Passmoor to talk of “putting down footprints” for players coming through is not simple cliché. For Chelsea, it was important to shake off the beginnings of a reputation for choking. They were beaten FA Cup finalists in 2012, and despite the huge steps taken since Hayes’s appointment, last season they lost in the semi-finals of both domestic cup competitions and suffered a final-day defeat to Manchester City that cost them the WSL title on goal difference.
“People had things to say about that,” Aluko said. “Chelsea are mentally weak, blah, blah, blah.” The team’s inconsistency in the second half of this season gave rise to more questions. “But we knew in that dressing room that we were strong enough to win this trophy.”
In Hayes they have a manager who knows how to nurture a group of players. Though Chelsea have one of the league’s biggest budgets (recently signing the England forward Fran Kirby from the WSL2 side Reading for an undisclosed but reportedly record fee), the squad that travelled to Wembley also included the academy graduates Hannah Blundell and Drew Spence, both in the starting XI.
Before the match the manager gave each player a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s If to read on the bus, the last line edited to promise that they would be not men, my son, but wise women. “I wanted more than anything else to put them in a calm space,” she explained. In her garden she had grown pink roses, a symbol of calm, for each of them to wear.
“Most of the younger players, of course, are like: ‘Here’s the gaffer, she’s off her head again,’” Hayes said. “My senior players thought it was a lovely gesture.” The captain, Katie Chapman, who joined from Arsenal last year at the age of 31, already had eight FA Cup final-winners medals at home – she collected her first at the age of 14, with Millwall Lionesses. Yet when the final whistle blew, Chapman was first and fastest to sprint across the pitch to the technical area and wrap her arms around the manager in celebration.
