Stoke City 1 Chelsea 0 reaction: Jose Mourinho's assistants play his part directly from his script

This time, there was no manic disbelieving laughter as we’ve seen so often from the Chelsea bench over the past few weeks, but there was some sarcastic applause.

It emphasised that Jose Mourinho’s influence was still very much on the champions’ bench – and the minds of his staff – even if he was not. Shortly before Marko Arnautovic’s key goal, Steve Holland offered that ironic gesture after referee Anthony Taylor’s response to a Diego Costa fall. So much remained the same for Chelsea.

In the absence of Mourinho, Holland took the lead, and the coach was also the first off the bench to issue instructions. The Portuguese has three main first-team assistants in the Englishman, Rui Faria, his long-time deputy, and Silvino Louro – who was sent off in that chaotic game at West Ham United – but all were deferring to Holland.

Of course, part of that was because Mourinho had given such detailed instructions to his staff – right down to whether those in specific positions were under-performing and the movement of certain players – so it almost became about following a template for them. The manager was allowed communicate with his staff, unlike with Uefa bans.

That they were following orders could be seen early on. When Mourinho is on the bench, one of the players he gives more instructions to than anyone else is Eden Hazard. He can regularly be heard calling “Eden! Eden!” and the playmaker heard it again here after a few minutes, if from a different Portuguese accent. When Erik Pieters went down injured, Faria beckoned Hazard over for a long chat.

A reason that Mourinho does that is because, without a truly sophisticated attacking plan, so much of Chelsea’s forward play revolves around the Belgian.

For all the theories that Mourinho’s absence might liberate the attackers, that wasn’t the case. One thing that the lack of Mourinho did disrupt was the champions’ rigorously drilled approach to fourth officials. A feature of Chelsea games under the Portuguese has been his staff taking it turns to hector the man with the mike, but that couldn’t happen to the same degree here.

It did help, of course, that there just wasn’t as much controversy.

Instead, it was Mark Hughes who was the more animated, especially when Costa got involved in an incident with Ryan Shawcross just before half-time.

That changed as the game wore on. By the time that Pedro had smashed the post in response to Arnautovic’s strike, Faria and Holland were spending much more time in the technical area rather than back on the bench.

Making the necessary changes, they were following the manager’s instructions to the letter. It didn’t change the number of points yielded: zero.

All of this was out of Mourinho’s hands, as his assistants could only hold their heads in their hands.