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While The London club avoided a total demolition of their chances of ending up in the highest eight places of the continental tournament group stage, they performed a precise, surgical strike on their own hopes of waltzing straight into the knockout stages. Naturally, the silver lining is that in the short one-year history of the new and not-necessarily-improved tournament, securing a top-eight finish isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

The Core Concern: A Predictable Lack of Consistency

Unfortunately for the club's supporters, the only consistent thing about the Chelsea team is a monotonously predictable inconsistency, which has been widely discussed following their defeat in Italy. After apparently rubber-stamping their credentials with an impressive beat-down of a European giant, followed by a feisty stalemate with a London rival, Chelsea have been stuffed by a Championship side, played out a dull draw at Bournemouth and have now been beaten by a average team from Italy's top flight.

While critics have been quick to lay the blame on a selection policy that appears to see Enzo Maresca rotate his team like a kebab shop’s elephant leg of doner meat, the manager insists that, knack and naughty step permitting, the core of his first eleven for games against strong opposition is mostly fixed.

“I think in that game, first XI, we had on the field the majority of the team that play against Tottenham, they play against Barcelona, they play against Wolverhampton, Arsenal,” he stated. “There were 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 a different situation.”

What Comes Next

To have any realistic chance of escaping the additional knockout round, they will have to win their remaining two matches. First up, they welcome the unexpected contenders Pafos, before heading back to Italy to face the Serie A champions, Napoli.

“We need to win both, otherwise, we try to play the extra round and then progress to the following stage,” remarked Maresca, whose next appointment is a game against an Merseyside team whose recent consistency has taken to them to the dizzy heights of seventh in the domestic league.

Other Notes

Quote of the Day: “It's interesting, it’s actually funny because his biggest dream was me becoming a professional golfer. That was his ultimate ambition. So when I was 10, he pushed me to take up golf. So I played golf every week from when I was 10 to 13” – Erling Haaland explained how, had his dad got his way, he could have been teeing off rather than scoring goals in the Premier League.

Fan Correspondence

“So, no wonder Wolverhampton Wanderers are in such a sad state. As any regular reader of this email will know, the only effective pre-match protests involve marching from a pub that the supporters intended to visit anyway, to the ground that they were inevitably going to. Just showing up 10 minutes late? That’s how long it takes fans to get to their seats anyway” – one reader.

“I note that a reader not only got Tuesday’s letter o’ the day, but also a mention in another reader's letter. On a night where both Sheffield teams once more surrendered points after leading, I am led to ponder: could Sheffield be proving that the frequency of appearances in your mailbag is inversely proportional to the success of anything our teams are accomplishing on the field?” – a different supporter.