The Blues had lost away to the Reds in the opening game of the season, a rare blemish in the league campaign, but despite going behind early on in yesterday’s home meeting, goals from Niamh Charles and Sam Kerr won the three points to really put the pressure on the league leaders. If Chelsea win our two games in hand then we will move top of the table.

‘We haven't played in the WSL for so long,’ observed Hayes, as she reflected on the 2-1 win at Kingsmeadow. ‘The performance showed that.

‘We have played in the FA Cup and we have played in the Champions League, and we needed this game to get back into WSL play because it’s such a different game.

‘You could see in the first 10 minutes that the team was asleep, which was to be expected in terms of a little bit of a hangover from the Champions League semi-final. When you're playing in front of 72,000 people and then 1,600 and everything that comes with that, there's an adjustment and I felt the first half reflected that.

‘These players have been going non-stop since July and it is a grind. You dig and dig and dig and they found new levels of grind and new levels of dig in this game.’

Hayes said that Liverpool scoring after two minutes made the game hard because as time drew on, Matt Beard’s side became increasingly defensive in their set-up.

‘It's hard to keep moving them with movements and switches,’ noted the Chelsea manager. ‘The quality of the execution of our final pass was going out of play. It was not pretty in many ways but the team stuck at it and Jessie Fleming was excellent.

‘And Sam was around when something for probably the first time in the game fell to her amongst their players.’

Hayes again highlighted the importance of the quality and versatility she is able to bring off the bench to boost the level of the team, the finishers, as she likes to label them. One of those against Liverpool was Pernille Harder whom is recently back from a lengthy injury.

‘I'm really pleased for Pernille, no question,’ she said. ‘In the back-three we really missed Maren [Mjelde]. ‘Playing in a back-three really suits her but she jarred her back a couple of days ago. It is not a big injury.

‘Maren who was formerly a midfielder can step in between the two [defence and midfield] but I didn't feel we were able to comfortably do that between the three playing so I changed to a back-four which instantly helped the team. I probably took too long to do that. Then that means your playmakers are somewhere else on the pitch which is what I felt we needed.

‘I didn't feel we had enough bodies in the box in the first half, our movement wasn’t fantastic, so Pernille coming in really helped with that. All the finishers came in and did what was asked of them against the team that was getting lower and lower and with more numbers in the backline, so were tough to play against.’

One player who sadly will not be involved in the remaining six games of the season or the World Cup is Fran Kirby, who is undergoing knee surgery having been out with a problem for three months. Hayes says there are no regrets the operation was not carried out sooner.

‘You don't want to carve people open, you always want to try and have rehab with non-invasive ways because there's risks with surgery,’ she explained.

‘She doesn't have an ACL injury. She has a piece of bone that needed removing on a patella [kneecap], bone that she was born with.’