Chelsea hammer dismal Liverpool 9-1 and storm into Women’s League Cup semis

It is not supposed to be this easy, in a quarter-final between two top-flight sides. Chelsea barely broke sweat as they put nine goals past woeful Liverpool, including a hat-trick from Johanna Rytting Kaneryd and two goals from an in-form Sam Kerr.

It took just 13 minutes for Chelsea to take the lead. Niamh Charles’s low ball into the box found Kerr, who darted in front of her marker with ease and found the near, bottom corner.

If Gareth Taylor was frustrated at a lack of pressure on the ball for the first goal, Chelsea’s second, just four minutes later, will have infuriated him further. His team gave away possession inside their own defensive third and allowed Kerr to finish neatly.

It was 3-0 when Wieke Kaptein turned smoothly on the edge of the box and lashed in a good finish. Aggie Beever-Jones’s effort made it 4-0 before half-time, prior to the game’s only sour note for Chelsea, when the England striker had to be withdrawn with a potential injury.

Aggie Beever-Jones scores her team’s fourth goal before going off injured. Photograph: Ben Roberts Photo/Getty Images

Then a confident Rytting Kaneryd began to steal the show, curling in a beauty from distance. Jenna Clark did claw one back for Liverpool from close range but any respite was brief, with Rytting Kaneryd’s deflected effort making it 6-1 just moments later. Sjoeke Nüsken and Millie Bright both added further goals for the visitors either side of Rytting Kaneryd completing her treble, by which point, things were getting very embarrassing for the home side.

Liverpool could scarcely win the ball off the holders and they were slow to react to second balls, most notably as Nüsken’s left-footed shot came back off the crossbar and Rytting Kaneryd was the first to reach the rebound for her hat-trick. In the stands, the atmosphere amongst the home supporters was increasingly dejected. Surprisingly, the majority of the 2,467 crowd stayed until the end. Taylor’s expression was downbeat, to say the least. His players’ body language, even worse.

Bottom of the league and now emphatically out of the League Cup, pressure will be higher than ever on the former Manchester City coach, who was appointed in August and has not yet overseen a league win. But this was his team’s worst afternoon by a distance.