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Although Chelsea avoided a total demolition of their chances of ending up in the highest eight places of the continental tournament group stage, they executed a targeted blow on their own chances of automatically qualifying for the round of 16. Naturally, the silver lining is that in the brief history of the recently revamped competition, securing a place in the top eight isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Core Problem: A Monotonous Inconsistency

Unfortunately for the club's supporters, the only consistent thing about the Chelsea team is a reliably erratic lack of consistency, which has been much remarked upon following their defeat in Italy. After seemingly confirming their quality with an commanding victory of Barcelona, and then a feisty stalemate with Arsenal, the team have been defeated by a Championship side, played out a snoozy stalemate at Bournemouth and have now been beaten by a average team from Serie A.

While critics have been eager to point the finger on a selection policy that appears to see Enzo Maresca rotate his team constantly, the manager maintains that, knack and naughty step permitting, the core of his first eleven for games against strong opposition is mostly fixed.

“I think tonight, first XI, we had on the field the majority of the team that featured against Tottenham, they play against Barcelona, they play against Wolverhampton, the Gunners,” he stated. “We had eight, nine players that are the ones consistently selected for these kind of games. So if you see the five changes that we did from the previous game, it’s different.”

What Comes Next

To have any realistic chance of escaping the additional knockout round, Chelsea will have to be victorious in their final two group games. In the first, they host this season’s surprise package a Cypriot team, then travel back to Italy to face the Italian title holders, the Neapolitan side.

“We need to win both, otherwise, we try to play the playoff and then progress to the following stage,” sniffed Maresca, whose following fixture is a game against an Everton team whose current form has taken to them to the dizzy heights of the top half in the domestic league.

Side Stories

Notable Comment: “It's interesting, it’s somewhat ironic because his biggest dream was me becoming a professional golfer. That was his biggest dream. So when I was 10, he forced me to start on golf. So I played golf every week from when I was 10 to 13” – Erling Haaland explained how, if his father had his preference, he could have been teeing off rather than tearing it up in the top flight.

Readers' Letters

“So, no wonder Wolves are in such a poor situation. As any regular reader of this column will know, the only good pre-match protests involve marching from a pub that the supporters planned to be at anyway, to the ground that they were always going to. Just showing up 10 minutes late? That’s how long it takes fans to get to their seats anyway” – a correspondent.

“I note that one correspondent not only got the previous letter o’ the day, but also a mention in a separate letter. On a night where both Sheffield teams once more dropped points after leading, I am wondering: could Sheffield be proving that the regularity of appearances in your letters section is inversely related to the value of anything our teams are achieving on the field?” – another fan.