Chelsea 7 Aston Villa 1: What will the excuse be this time?

Chelsea had 67.7% of the first half and I wouldn´t be surprised if they had about the same in the second, if not more. It was basically embarrassing today.

We started out playing 4-5-1 with Gabby on the right and while I know O´Neill likes his players to be able to play everywhere, surely, we had better options for playing 4-5-1 than that? Maybe not and you can disagree, but it didn´t work.

We went in at half time only 2-1 down and in the second half we reverted to the retro 4-4-2 and then it all went wrong, although that isn´t the reason - Chelsea just showed us how to play the passing/possession/creating space game today.

Believe what you want to believe in, but this season is very quickly turning into a scrap for 7th, let alone any form of European football and progress will be marked by where we finish in the league.

We can get away with finishing 6th and put it down to ´further consolidation´, but I don´t think Lerner is going to throw more money at the project if after everything the manager has had, he can´t go forward. Do you?

I for one think the games coming up are going to be very important for the manager because I don´t think the owner will be happy going backwards.

Post-mortem tomorrow and I guess we are just lucky Everton didn´t win by four because of they did, we would be eighth now.

But - it was Chelsea away and well, it was always going to be hard and it is only one game and we can still do it and there are plenty of points to play for and Spurs have to play the top three and we have an easy run in and it would be wrong to think that four seasons in we could go to Chelsea and get something, let alone the majority expecting us to get beaten even before kick off.

So, what excuse are we going to get?