Sunderland Ladies 0-5 Chelsea Ladies

England winger Gemma Davison (centre) scored Chelsea's third goal at the Hetton Centre

Chelsea Ladies thrashed Sunderland Ladies to move two points behind Women's Super League One leaders Manchester City Women.

Left-back Claire Rafferty's crisp, far-post volley put Chelsea ahead, before she poked in to double the lead.

Gemma Davison's low finish made it 3-0, Millie Bright added a long-range fourth after half-time and Ji So-Yun tucked in the fifth for the defending champions.

Sunderland have now conceded 16 goals in the past four league matches.

Wednesday's WSL 1 action

The Lady Black Cats, who beat Chelsea 4-0 at home in the league last year, were second best throughout.

They have now lost four consecutive games, including a 5-1 loss defeat at Arsenal on Saturday.

Carlton Fairweather's side have not won a league match since July and remain three points above bottom club Doncaster Rovers Belles, who have four games in hand.

Chelsea could have increased their winning margin, but England winger Karen Carney struck the post in the first half.

Chelsea winger Gemma Davison: "We always knew we were going to be in the title race. There are some good teams involved here with Man City and Arsenal. You never know what will happen in this league.

We've been putting a lot of hard work on the training ground and it's paid off. We could have had more and we just want to build on it.

"We knew it was going to be tough coming up to Sunderland. They perform well at their home ground and they have a really good crowd that get behind them so we knew we had to take it seriously and come and produce a result and we did that."

Sunderland defender Stephanie Bannon: "Going into the game we were quite confident. On our home ground we thought we could get something but Chelsea have some fantastic players, full of internationals.

"I think we competed for the first 20-25 minutes and we matched them across the park. But once the first one went in, two and three came in quite quick succession and at half-time, we'd given ourselves a mountain to climb.

"We didn't feel sorry for ourselves. We believed in ourselves, we tried to play a bit of football, we tried to compete first and foremost."