I remember the first time I met Emma Hayes and we were chatting about goals. She was upfront, determined, clear and certain.
"To win the Champions League," she said.
It was both that simple and that complex. Win the Women's Super League (WSL) in 2019-2020 and then the Champions League in 2020-2021.
She took over the Chelsea Women's team in 2012 and nine years later, she now has the opportunity to achieve what she has worked a lifetime for. Hayes has built a team that is absolutely capable of winning the biggest prize in women’s club football.
Having already bagged the WSL for a second consecutive season, they’ve also won the Continental Cup and have the latter stages of FA Cup to look forward to later in the year, after it was moved into next season.
Chelsea’s 2021 Champions League journey has been built on learning the lessons of defeat in the past. Prior to this campaign, Chelsea had never got past the semi-final stage.
They lost to Wolfsburg eight times through the Hayes’ tenure, so when the pair were drawn against each other in the quarter-finals of this season’s competition, it presented an opportunity to get the biggest monkey off their back.
And so they did, 5-1 on aggregate. It was a defining moment.
It proved that the Chelsea project was working. The recruitment strategy was effective. The careful, meticulous identification and pursuit of the players that would make this team better was on the money.
Pernille Harder, the world’s most expensive female player, scored two of the five goals that eliminated her former club from this year’s Champions League, after joining Chelsea at the start of this season. She was cherry-picked to take the Londoners to a new level.
The same can be said of Germany international, Melanie Leupolz, another recent recruit for the Blues. The former Bayern Munich captain also scored against her old team, when Chelsea despatched them in the semi-final.
To add to that, Hayes also recruited Australia International striker, Sam Kerr. It was a real statement of intent, to bring in a player who had been top-scorer in the leagues she played in, in the US, Australia and now she finished the 2020-2021 WSL season with the Golden boot to make it top-scorer in three continents in five years.
Goalkeeper Ann-Katrin Berger was another shrewd acquisition. It’s hard to believe the German international only made her debut for her country in last year’s European Championship qualifier against the Republic of Ireland in Dublin.
She is easily, the best female goalkeeper in the world right now with everything in her game. Distribution, shot-stopping, communication, dominating the 18-yard box, organising her defence and sheer resilience.
After being diagnosed with thyroid cancer in November 2017, 'AKB’ (above) openly talks about how it made her appreciate football more, and now she has the opportunity to do it all in the game.
The Chelsea team is full of women who have suffered for their right to play for the top prize in club football. England international, Fran Kirby, overcame a career-threatening illness in the 2019-2020 season and goes into this final with 16 WSL goals to her name and she is also joint top-scorer in this Champions League campaign with six goals so far.
Chelsea are an intense, high-pressing team who counter-attack quickly, but they can also pick teams apart through patient build-ups. They are also ruthlessly able to score goals from set pieces.
This squad is laced with top-level international players; they are tactically versatile, technically superb, physically strong and mentally resilient and most of all, they are ready.
But so too are their opponents, Barcelona.
The first time I saw them live, was in a pre-season game against Arsenal in London, in August 2019. They were exhilarating to watch. Utterly creative and dynamic in their attacks, but sometimes porous in defence due to the risks they were prepared to take to score. They won the game 5-2.
Like Chelsea, they have never won the Champions League.
Like Chelsea, they have been building for this for years.
Like Chelsea, they have built on lessons from defeat.
In 2019, they were beaten by Lyon in the final. Lyon have won the last three Champions Leagues in a row and were strong favourites to win it again.
For the chance to meet Lyon in the semi-final, Barcelona had to dispatch Manchester City, the team that pushed Chelsea to the last day of the WSL. The Spanish side won the first leg 3-0. It was over before it began. They were awesome on the day and went on to win the tie 4-2 on aggregate.
The semi-final would not be a scripted one. A hugely talented PSG team beat Lyon in the shock of the quarter-final results, and put up a significant battle against Barca, but Lluis Cortes’ side progressed 3-2 on aggregate after a nail-biting finale.
Their team is laced with Spanish, Dutch, French and Norwegian internationals. They ooze creativity in Lieke Martens, pace and finishing in Asisat Oshaola, technical excellence and vision in Caroline Graham Hansen.
Barcelona normally play with a 4-3-3 so it will be really interesting to see if Chelsea go with a 4-4-2 diamond, a system they play really well, in order to try to overload the middle of park and get Pernille Harder free to play the floating role that she loves and is so good at.
Both teams have immense attacking potential and both have defensive frailties so I expect we will see goals. Both teams like to play on the front foot so I don’t expect this to be a cagey 0-0 type of game, where one team nicks it. That type of game is in neither team’s DNA.
Both teams have quality, physicality, pace, game intelligence and a huge hunger to win this trophy.
My heart says Chelsea, my head says it will be an absolute belter of a game.
