\n<\/p>\n
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.<\/b><\/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<\/div>\n
<\/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 them in the Women’s Champions League. But this was a missed opportunity. Chelsea were the better side on the night, dominating most of the first half and creating plenty of goalscoring opportunities. They led for eight minutes<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1680,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1679","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-football"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1679"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1679\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1680"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1679"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1679"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/outdoorthrill.cfd\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1679"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}