Beating bad teams and losing to better ones, Chelsea are yet to show where their level is

Brighton, Crystal Palace, Burnley, Sheffield United, Newcastle and Leeds. They are all found in the lower half of the table but that is not the sole common denominator. They are Chelsea’s six victims in the Premier League this season. Winning the most winnable games can carry a team a long way and has taken Chelsea top at times, but not this week. The summer’s biggest buyers could end this round of fixtures in eighth, heading for mid-table after losing to sides who often finish there.

Defeats to Everton and Wolves were signs Chelsea have failed a test by the best of the rest. Another follows, with West Ham on Monday, while their December ends against another of the upwardly mobile middle class, in Aston Villa. In seasons when Manchester City and Liverpool set stratospherically high points tallies, such games were routinely won by the eventual champions. The sense is that no one is that consistent now; Chelsea are certainly not, and they found themselves thwarted by the sort of sides they need to overcome if ambitions are to be realised. Beating the bottom half, after all, can only yield a maximum of 60 points.

They can point to narrow margins, to the fact they hit the woodwork three times over 180 minutes, and that it took an injury-time goal by an inspired Pedro Neto to beat them at Molineux. And yet, as Frank Lampard said: “My experience with the Premier League tells me that if you drop your standards, which we have in two games, and particularly away from home, you can lose football matches so a big lesson for the players there.”

A relative rookie as a manager, he was a three-time Premier League champion as a player. He can draw on memories of the resolve those feats required. This side have lost more league games in four days than Jose Mourinho’s famously steadfast team did in the entirety of the 2004-05 campaign. Title talk, some of it from Jurgen Klopp, had always irritated Lampard, who argued his side were a work in progress.

“I still think there's a lot of improvement to be done with the group so I wouldn't say I'm massively surprised,” he said. They were not streetwise enough for a manager who sounded pragmatic. “At 1-0, we should see the game out,” he added. “If you’re not playing that well, hang on to 1-0.”

Neto’s winner was a source of particular annoyance. “It's pretty simple that the threat from Wolves clearly is the counter-attack,” he said. And yet Neto was permitted to break at pace. “I think we had enough players to deal with it but we just weren't prepared to counter press if the ball got headed out of the box. We kept Thiago Silva back, we had enough numbers to deal with and we didn't deal with it well enough.”

Thiago and Edouard Mendy have brought defensive improvement, but it is now four goals conceded in three games; scarcely Kepa Arrizabalaga-esque, but a reminder that the modern-day Chelsea rearguard is not as impenetrable as John Terry, Petr Cech and co were 15 years ago.

Nor, indeed, have this Chelsea proved themselves as streetwise as that side did. “Clearly when we perform like we did today that's not game management; that's not the quality levels that we are striving for,” Lampard added.

Indeed, there felt too little quality from Chelsea. Kai Havertz was ineffectual, anonymous and replaced; not for the first time, the £72 million recruit looked a poor man’s Mason Mount and if rustiness and a debilitating bout of coronavirus are mitigating factors, it will be instructive if Mateo Kovacic displaces him on Monday. Timo Werner, who may have been overworked, was out of sorts on the right; Germany’s first-choice striker was used in what is his third-best position. The supposed superstar signings represented the greatest disappointments on the night.

Yet spending has raised the bar and raised expectations. The paradox is that Chelsea have got better but without beating any of the better teams yet. A fixture list that has featured stalemates with Manchester United and Tottenham has otherwise represented something of a soft landing, but a 17-game run without a loss felt auspicious.

“We had a long unbeaten run,” Lampard said. “Everyone sang our praises. I was the last one to do that. It's my job to stay level-headed on both ends.”  But, a third of the way into the season, Chelsea are yet to show where their level is.