The 28-year-old looked as though she had given Albion all three points after her well-taken 84th minute strike, before Adelina Engman broke Albion hearts with a stoppage-time equaliser. Whelan believes that this result will set a reminder to teams heading to Sussex that they won’t be in for an easy ride.
She said, “I think everyone had ruled us out of this game before it had even started, so to have held them to a draw after 90 minutes, score a goal and come away with a point is a positive on our behalf.
“It is a shame that we couldn’t get all three points, but that's what Chelsea are known for – putting the pressure on you and unfortunately we couldn’t stop them from scoring. This result proves to the league that it won’t be easy to come here and get three points.”
Albion shaded the play for long periods of the match and Whelan praised the week’s training preparations which allowed them to be well disciplined, but urged the team to be more clinical in taking their chances.
“Tactically we were set up to be able to break down their lines and play football through them so they didn’t just come and counter us the whole time,” she continued.
"We executed the tactics which Hope had set us, and worked on them all week in training. We also had a lot more of the ball than we expected, but we needed to be more clinical and should have scored more than one goal."
Despite what may have been seen as two points lost, the forward was quick to praise the team’s quality and is looking at the result as one point gained in what will be another challenging FAWSL season.
“We’ve come on a long way since last season, where we might have bowed down and given them the three points. This year you can see that we have the desire and the enthusiasm to improve on what we did last season.
“There were patches where we played them off the park and looked like a better team, so we need to take that confidence into the rest of the season and prove we can perform against the big teams.
“It is disappointing to concede so late but we weren’t expecting to get anything from the game, so we can’t be too hard on ourselves after claiming a point.
“We’ve set ourselves targets and take it game by game on what we need to produce. It’s about performances for us and every game we are developing and getting better. Long-term, this is going to be a club where people want to be, and we want to put a stamp on this league.”