Scolari's Chelsea may be just two games old but already columnist Giles Smith is drawing parallels with 1970 vintage Blues.

I can't have been the only person who spotted a couple of differences between this weekend's performance against Wigan and last weekend's performance against Portsmouth.

Like the fact that we scored three fewer goals, for instance. That jumped out a bit. And like the fact that the overwhelming, energetically creative and frankly Brazilian nature of the opening day's display was not entirely replicated up at Wigan, where, to repeat the most commonly used phrase in the match reports, we 'ground out a victory'.

But, hey - we didn't really think we were going to go through an entire season, breathtakingly swashbuckling our way to success, did we?

Well, yes, as a matter of fact, after the crushing of Portsmouth, some of us did think that - and still, even now, not unreasonably imagine that this is how a large part of the upcoming campaign will be spent. But I guess it can't hurt to introduce a note of realism - and to introduce one early on.

The important thing, probably, is to stress the things that the two performances did have in common - most obviously, the clean sheet and the three points. It might also be worth reflecting that Saturday's result represented a major advance on the last time we played Wigan (at home, near the end of last season), when we suffered the strange and completely unpredictable indignity of seeing our title challenge derailed by Emile Heskey. (You would have had a tenner on a pig passing low over the West Stand before you would have put money on that happening.)

It might also be worth noting that we are top of the Premier League and, moreover, that, after only two games of the season, we are one of only a pair of teams with a 100 percent league record. And given that the other side is streaky old Liverpool, who clinched their victory over Middlesbrough on Saturday with the traditional, fourth-minute-of-injury-time, thump-it-and-hope effort from Steven Gerrard, you could almost argue that, in effect, in pure footballing terms, we're on our own up there.

Now, you could look at the table at this point and say something about the quality that runs right through the Premier League, and the fact that, as we're often being told, 'anyone can beat anyone on their day'. Or, instead, you can scratch your head about the weird underperformance, so far, of Arsenal and Manchester United (almost certainly temporary, unfortunately).

Some of us, though, find ourselves absorbed by a far more important statistical and historical issue - namely, did Deco on Saturday become the first comprehensively and undeniably bearded player to appear for Chelsea since David Webb?

Webb, you may recall, having cemented his legendary status at this club by scoring the winning goal in the 1970 FA Cup final, turned up for the start of the following season looking as if he had spent the summer on a desert island - or, at any rate, somewhere without a chemist's or a barber's. But since then, if memory serves, Stamford Bridge has commonly been a fairly smooth-cheeked sort of place.

Just to be clear, I'm not counting moustaches here, or other wispy accessories - so that pretty categorically rules out Ed de Goey, whose facial hair always looked as if it might be susceptible to one short blast from a carelessly handled hairdryer anyway. It also, for that matter, rules out Gianluca Vialli, whose beard was fundamentally a creation of the nail scissors.

And nor do I mean accidents involving 5 o'clock shadow or carefully cultivated, George Michael-style stubble (eliminating, among others, Ashley Cole and Nicolas Anelka). I'm talking the full and deliberate Captain Birdseye.

Incidentally, though, on the subject of moustaches, there's a fair bit of upper lip decoration going on around the Chelsea bench at the moment, not only from the manager, but also from a couple of the management team that he brought in, and it leads us to wonder whether Steve Clarke can be encouraged to join in. It would send a signal, we think.

Anyway, Deco appeared against Wigan with a layer of growth that wasn't there a week ago, leading to speculation that he's accepted some kind of typically football-related challenge, whereby he's not shaving until we lose. I hope not because, on the evidence of what we've seen so far, he'll be tripping over the thing before then.

Either way John Terry may eventually have to step in. Not only is he the team captain, he is also the official face of King of Shaves male grooming products. For both those reasons, he might want to have a word.