West Ham had scored five goals in seven Women's Super League matches before Sunday. They scored four in 62 minutes against Liverpool. Viviane Asseyi took two of them and the Hammers climbed off the bottom half of the table with the kind of afternoon that makes a season look different by five o'clock than it did at two.
The opener arrived in the seventh minute. Ines Belloumou worked the ball down the left, Fuka Nagano fouled Asseyi inside the area, and Asseyi put the penalty away herself. Eight minutes later it was two, Leila Wandeler running at the Liverpool defence, exchanging passes with Seraina Piubel and finishing past Khiara Keating.
A third before the break, and a deflection that summed it up
Asseyi hit the crossbar in between, which on another day would have been the moment the game turned back. It did not. Just before half-time Laia Codina struck from 30 yards, the ball took a heavy deflection off Jenna Clark and looped over Keating. Three up at the interval, against a side that had started the day above them.
The fourth, in the 62nd minute, was the best of them. Asseyi won a free-kick and then curled it in herself, the shot dipping just under the crossbar with Keating beaten again. Two goals, one won free-kick converted, and an average player rating of 8.44 from BBC Sport readers, the highest on either side.
Liverpool's afternoon unravelled early
For Liverpool there was very little to take from it. Keating was beaten four times and was not obviously at fault for any of them, which is its own kind of problem. The concession pattern was the worry: a penalty inside seven minutes, a second goal from a straightforward run and one-two, a third from distance that nobody closed down.
Vivien Endemann, on as a substitute, pulled one back 10 minutes after the fourth went in, her low shot taking a deflection off Codina on the way through. It made the scoreline 4-1 and changed nothing else about the game.
What it does to the table
The win was West Ham's third of the WSL season and it moved them above Liverpool into 10th. Liverpool drop to 11th, a point and a place behind. For a West Ham side that had looked blunt through the opening seven rounds, the significant thing is not the three points so much as the four goals, which is nearly as many as they had managed in the whole campaign to that point.
Whether this is a turning point or an outlier is the question that will only be answered by what they do next. Scoring four once is a result. Scoring regularly is a different thing, and West Ham have not yet shown they can do it.
Match facts: West Ham United 4-1 Liverpool, Women's Super League, Sunday 1 November 2026. Asseyi 7' (pen) and 62', Wandeler 15', Codina before half-time, Endemann 72'. Player of the match: Viviane Asseyi. West Ham up to 10th, Liverpool 11th.
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