After Chelsea Women were drawn to face French and European champions Lyon in the quarter-finals of this season’s Women’s Champions League, we look back to the last time we faced OL in the competition, in what felt like a coming of age for Emma Hayes’ team, even if a heroic performance was not quite enough to give us our first appearance in the final.
There was a clear favourite in that 2019 semi-final. The Blues were still finding our place in Europe as we attempted to take the next step by replicating our domestic success on the continental scene. Lyon, on the other hand, had just claimed their 13th consecutive league title and featured in seven of the previous 10 Champions League finals. They were on an incredible 120-game unbeaten run in all competitions. There was an obvious underdog in the tie, and they weren’t French.
However, while acknowledging the size of the challenge we would need to overcome to reach our first Champions League final – perhaps the toughest of her time with Chelsea at that stage – Hayes did well to ensure there was no inferiority complex in her team. No matter how impressive our opponents, we would give as good as we got.
It seemed like the occasion might have got to the Blues team, who were relatively inexperienced at the business end of the Champions League, at the start of the first leg in France, though. First Magdalena Eriksson diverted a cross into her own net and then a defensive mix-up gifted Lyon a corner, which evaded everyone and went straight in, to put us 2-0 down.
But Chelsea refused to fold and fought back to put Lyon in the unfamiliar position of being on the back foot on home soil. We were close to pulling a goal back before the break, only for Fran Kirby’s penalty to be saved, but Erin Cuthbert did net a potentially crucial away goal with a fine strike from 20 yards in the second half.
That left things finely poised heading back to Kingsmeadow, with Chelsea feeling positive about our chances after taking some of the shine off Lyon’s veneer of invincibility, while a then-record crowd of 4,670 turned out to cheer us on in one of the biggest matches in Chelsea Women’s history.
Unfortunately, again, it wasn’t the start we wanted, as Eugenie Le Sommer’s shot found the net via a big deflection off Maren Mjelde to cancel out our away goal, but before long Ji So-Yun scored a textbook free-kick from just outside the box to cut Lyon’s advantage back to a single goal.
Suddenly it was Lyon who were under pressure and hanging on, as the Blues relentlessly pushed for an equaliser, roared on by a packed Kingsmeadow crowd.
Ultimately it was in vain, despite Karen Carney going agonisingly close to forcing extra time when her shot struck the post. Lyon emerged 3-2 winners on aggregate but the way the French side’s exhausted players slumped to the turf at the final whistle told you everything you needed to know about how close we had come to reaching a first Women’s Champions League final.
Even Lyon manager Reynald Pedros admitted Chelsea ‘were a whisker away’ adding: ‘It’s not very often when Lyon come off the field worn out both physically and mentally. We’re used to dominating sides and in some instances being head and shoulders above the competition, today that wasn’t the case’.
Indeed, it is not as a defeat that this two-legged semi-final is remembered, but as a statement performance which demonstrated not only that Chelsea had earned a new-found position among the European elite of the women’s game, able to match the best the sport had to offer, but that Lyon were no longer the invincible champions they had seemed for so long.
‘I can’t be critical,’ explained Hayes. ‘My players ran their socks off for me, they really did. They were brilliant and I’m proud of them. They went toe-to-toe and made them look average, it’s the start of a new era in the women’s game, I just would have liked to have put the nail in their coffin.’
Lyon went on to win the final comfortably that season, and the following one, but when Chelsea returned to the Women’s Champions League in 2020/21, it would be the Blues and not the French side who contested the showpiece, as we took another big step forward to reach the final for the first-ever time.