We had a depleted squad playing their first competitive game under Viera against the team fresh off winning the European Super Cup. Yes it would have been good to have applied a bit more pressure on Chelsea, but at least it should focus the squad and the management team. Our only hope was that Chelsea would be like Man Utd last season (ie half asleep) but Tuchel seems like a tough cookie who wouldn't allow for that. Brentford should tell us a lot more about where we're at, but it won't be easy with their direct, hard running approach.

Looking at the game there's a few points to take account of.

Without Luca, Gallagher, Olise, and Eze yesterday playing a 4-5-1 was probably not possible. Hopefully Luca and Gallager will be back for the Brentford game which is much more important than this one.

Chelsea managed an xG of 1.1 compared with 3.3 and 2.7 in our last two games against them. The second goal wants great defensively. Not much we could do about the first. The 3rd could have been closed down, did anyone notice how Reidewald was blocked off by the ref when running across the pitch?

I wasn't particularly impressed with Burnley, Brighton, Norwich, Southampton, Watford. I don't think any of them would have performed better today.

PV mentioned more signings may be on the way. It would be nice to see if we could get a right back and a right winger.

There's a lot of things we haven't been doing well at over the last 4 years. Corners have been poor, not enough crosses, sticking with a failing system, consistently playing underperformed players, not giving youth a chance, transfer police of bringing in aging journeymen. I'm hopeful a lot of that will change. There's been some encouraging signs over the summer.

I've got a bit of a concern over who the leaders are in the team, and the number of changes we've had to make.

Losing Townsend appears to be a blow.

I just hope that the decision to let him go doesn't come back to haunt us.

Rather worrying that Vieira said after the match that his team was too young and needs to buy more players. Good luck with that. So much for the youth policy. Also shows how silly it was to get rid of the two stalwarts in defence, Cahill and Dann.

The right place at the right time

I would just like to say that I doubt we would beat the current Chelsea team if we had spent £200 million.

The game yesterday was much like the previous handful against Chelsea where we have been totally outplayed and offered almost nothing.

Start panicking if we lose to Brentford and Brighton.

What is the issue exactly?