Chelsea Women had to come from behind after conceding early on when we hosted Brighton & Hove Albion at Kingsmeadow in the Women's Super League, but did exactly that as Sjoeke Nusken inspired us to victory, netting a hat-trick before setting up our fourth in a 4-2 win.

Nusken was the talk of Kingsmeadow at the final whistle following an eye-catching individual showing, scoring her first goals since joining the Blues in the summer, and Emma Hayes enjoyed the performance, even if the German is still finding her place in the team.

'I think we at Chelsea all knew what a talent she was,' said Hayes. 'We can see she wants to be front-footed, she wants to be higher up the park. We have to still work with her on balancing out some things at times, but it was a wonderful performance from a player who’s settled really well into the club.

'I’d love to keep her as the pivot, but she likes going forward, so I see her somewhere between an 8 and a 10. She’s really aggressive, she’ll get in the box. Her second goal I thought was superb.

'She can go box-to-box so when we play a 3-4-3 you hope that she can stay in the double-pivot and in possession move a little bit higher. She has to work at the moments of when to counter-press immediately or when to come alongside Sophie [Ingle], but it’s all good learning still to do.'

Our fourth goal was also a first, as young striker Aggie Beever-Jones opened her senior account for Chelsea after coming off the bench. It was another pleasing moment for our manager, and underlined for her how important all of our substitutes were in the second half.

'It was brilliant, she’s talented,' added Emma. 'She stretches teams, she gets in behind. She too has some work to do to know when to press, where to press, when not to double down, all of that detail. But she’s always in our offices asking for analysis.

'Jessie [Fleming], Jelena [Cankovic], Johanna [Rytting Kaneryd], Aggie and Mia [Fishel] coming on all did well. Mia’s been injured, I think she needs to do a bit more work to get her fitness levels up, but I think that will come over the course of the season.

'I made changes early in the second half because I thought it was like a basketball match and I don’t want that! So I made changes because it’s important, even in the front areas, that you’ve got to defend. Fran’s still building her minutes, I didn’t think LJ looked the freshest today, but I thought the players who came from the bench were brilliant. They did their job.'

That theme of defending from the front continued as Hayes evaluated her team's performance against Brighton as a whole, along with the issue of being more clinical in the final third.

Ever the perfectionist, Emma is adamant her team still have plenty of room for improvement, despite remaining undefeated with three wins from our opening four league games this season.

'We won. We have three points. We had 4.22 XG for and 0.55 XG against. An 18 per cent conversion rate with 26 chances created and seven on target. We have the highest XG in the league, with the eighth-best conversion. So the team knew I wanted to focus on converting, but we have to have balance. So that’s the work we have to do.

'However, I think we’ve been more threatening in front of goal than the same stage of last year, so I’m really pleased with that. The league is better, the opponents are better, so their transitions are better, so our rest defence has to be better and we have to review that.

'There’s three moments in the game. You attack, you lose the ball - what’s called a transition - and then you defend. It’s important everyone understands, as good as the give-and-gos and little passes are, we’ve got to defend and everybody’s got to do that, particularly in that transition moment. I don’t think we’re doing as well in that area as yet.'