Leaders Chelsea return to the scene of their Women’s Super League title-winning night as we take on second-placed Manchester United at the Progress With Unity Stadium.

While the Blues head coach looked back on that evening back in April with fond memories, her thoughts are laser-focused on taking three points on Friday night against a difficult opponent.

‘Yeah, good memories, even if I was not expecting the title to be won that night,’ Bompastor smiles. ‘This league is really tough, so being able to win the league title with games left and playing against a big rival opposition team, I think it was great. But the game on Friday will be completely different. I think they made some adjustments from last season, but maybe I'll talk about that after the game.

‘Manchester United look strong. They had a good start to the season. We know it's always a tough game travelling to their ground. It will be a really exciting game on Friday evening, and we are ready.

‘We know they are a team who don't concede a lot of goals, so defensively they are quite strong, so we will have to find ways to create some opportunities and score goals if it's possible. We know we will have to be at our best level if we want to take three points from the game.

‘If you look at the table right now, they are near the top for a reason: they have a lot of quality in the squad. I think we need to find the right balance between focusing on them and knowing the quality we have. We need to focus on ourselves and be confident in the quality we have because if we are at our best level, we can perform against any team. So our mindset is this one.’

The Blues boss explained why the pressure of facing other top sides can be a positive for her players and why it’s important to be confident even in the face of difficult tests.

Bompastor has made changes to both her line-up and tactical system in the opening four matches of the season, but all of those tweaks feed into her main objective, which is to play on the front foot.

‘The mental aspect is crucial in terms of performance when you play high-level games like this,’ she continued. ‘My main job is to make sure the players come into every game with enough confidence to perform. It's also important for them to realise it's good to have some pressure. As long as that pressure doesn't go too high, it's good to have it.

‘We go into every game with confidence to perform, even when we know it will be a tough game.

‘As you can see, depending on my starting XI, we have a lot of offensive players on the pitch, and I think it’s okay for me to assume that we want to be an attacking team, we want to dominate the opposition. We also want to have a team that takes risks on the pitch going forward.

‘This is what we want to achieve as a team, and going into every game, maybe the plan will change a little bit.’

Now in October of her second season in charge at Chelsea, Sonia Bompastor has still not lost a single match in domestic competition.

That run has been extended with four wins from our opening four matches of the season, but when asked how much she is focusing on continuing that record, she was unequivocal in her response.

‘Zero per cent,’ she said. ‘The story about the unbeaten run is more for the journalists. We started this season from zero points, and we have won four games out of four. We want to go into every game with the desire to win.

'This hasn’t changed from last season, but it's a completely different season this year. We are early in the season, and we haven't achieved anything yet.'