The inbox of club statistician Paul Dutton is full of emails to his statistical enquiries forum - so it is time for some answers...

With Chelsea looking to return to first place in the league this weekend, I am going to start with a question about the very first time we topped the top flight.

It is one of three queries Alan Doyle has sent in about the early history of the club.

He asks when did Chelsea first top the English League having read various sources suggesting dates very early in the 1922/23 season? Alan has a suspicion that the club actually achieved this feat for the first time a couple of games into the 1919/20 season and he is correct.

We first looked down on the rest of English football on 1 September 1919 but that was after only two games of the season. In the 1922/23 season we were top after four games with seven points won.

Alan also asks where and when was Chelsea's first game under floodlights knowing full well that the first match under lights at Stamford Bridge was against Sparta Prague in March 1957. He speculates about some away games in England in 1954 but our first floodlit match was considerably earlier than that.

It was on 28 June 1929 during a tour of South America when we played a combined Rio de Janeiro XI.

Question number three relates to details on extra goals recently credited to pre-war striker George Mills. Similar queries also arrived from Blueboot and Alan Ball, and Samer asked about George Hilsdon's amended statistics.

For more on that I direct them to the Historical Discrepancy Corrections that were published on this website recently.

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It is the Chelsea captaincy succession that interests Kevin Clancy who wrote to tell me about a major debate amongst some hard core Chelsea Fans regarding who was the captain between Andy Townsend and Dennis Wise. He asks was there one, several or none and also enquires whether there was a change of captaincy around the time Wise got into trouble for an incident involving a taxi driver.

The answer to the first part is that there was no-one between Townsend and Wise with the handover taking place for the 1993/94 season. Townsend had left that summer.

Moving onto October 1994, Wise did lose the armband, temporarily, in the wake of his arrest for the taxi incident. Gavin Peacock took over for an away game versus Arsenal and he stayed captain until Wise was given back the role by Glenn Hoddle in February 1995. When Peacock was injured in that interim spell, Nigel Spackman captained.

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In the previous Ask Statman we recalled a 1992 midweek match at home to Southampton that drew an unusually small crowd. It was sandwiched between two weekend home games.

Steve Laurie throws further light on this by remembering that the Southampton match wasn't scheduled until close to the day. He thinks at the time of the previous Saturday's match versus Palace it wasn't known. He only heard about it at lunchtime on the day of the game itself!

Back in an era when information wasn't so easily circulated Steve reckons many fans simply didn't know the game was taking place and hence the low crowd.

Steve's excellent memory goes further. He has recollections that it was all about clearing a suspension for Jason Cundy (pictured below) ahead of what was regarded an important FA Cup tie against Sheffield United a few days later.

Going back to my records from that season, the original date for the Southampton game was Saturday 15 February, which was also the FA Cup fifth round weekend. When Chelsea progressed to that round and we drew Sheffield Utd, Southampton became a game that needed to be rearranged.

It was only mentioned in the programme sold at the Crystal Palace home game on February 8 that the Southampton game had been set for Wednesday 12, so it clearly was very short-notice. Cundy was serving a suspension and he could now play in the Sheffield United game. Dennis Wise was also suspended at the time but his suspension carried on and he missed the FA Cup game as well. So Steve's theory could well be true.

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Nipping across the Atlantic to Canada, Adam Nordin from Canada asks which team currently in the Barclays Premier League has never won at Stamford Bridge.

It is just one team - Hull City - but if I rephrase the question slightly I can name nine sides in this season's top flight who have not won a Premier League game at the Bridge. They are: Birmingham, Burnley, Fulham, Hull, Portsmouth, Stoke, Tottenham, Wigan, Wolves.

Adam also asks how many goals Didier Drogba needs to beat Chelsea's all-time scoring record (by Bobby Tambling) of 202 goals. He needs to net another 79 to move to 203.

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Staying that side of the pond, Michael Kaye who used to work for the FA before emigrating to live in upstate New York, raises the subject of a past player of extreme promise who just seemed to disappear.

That player's name was Mel Scott. Michael wishes to know more.

The details I have on Scott are that he was a Chelsea youth product who played centre-half in the notorious 1957/58 FA Youth Cup Final against Wolves. That was Chelsea's first final in the competition and I say notorious because we won the first leg 5-1 but then somehow lost the second leg 6-1.

Scott made his first team debut in March 1958 and in two of his four seasons he played just a handful of games but in 58/59 he played 38 games.

He made 104 Chelsea appearance in all before moving to Brentford in 1963. I'm not going comment on whether that counts as fading away. As Michael remembers in his email, the early promise was marked by England Under 23 caps, four in total, and he also won England youth caps.

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Harald de Boer from Holland continues the recent trend of wanting to know about Chelsea players from his country. He wonders how many Dutch Blues there were before Ken Monkou who joined us in the late 1980s.

The answer is none. Centre-back Ken was the first of 11 Dutchman to play in our first team. The others are:

Ruud Gullit
Ed de Goey
Mario Melchiot
Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink
Winston Bogarde
Boudewijn Zenden
Arjen Robben
Khalid Boulharouz
Jeffery Bruma
Patrick van Aanholt

Travelling further east, Ivan Russanov asks how many Russian players and players from the championship of Russia have played for Chelsea?

Dmitri Kharine, Alexey Smertin and Yury Zhirkov are the three Russians, Jiri Jarosik, Maniche and Branislav Ivanovic are players from other countries to play in the Russian League. If the scope of the question is widened to take in former parts of the Soviet Union then Ukrainian Andriy Shevchenko and Georgian Rati Aleksidze come into the frame.

Carlos Da Silva asked if there were any Portuguese players at Chelsea before the Jose Mourinho era. The answer is no.

On the nationality theme, I received an email from Kevin Doran after listing Chelsea's Republic of Ireland-born players in the last Ask Statman wondering if I had mistakenly omitted John Dempsey, but I hadn't as our original FA Cup-winning centre-half did play for Ireland but was born in Hampstead in London.

Bill Torode also suggests Bill Dickson should have been on the list, but he was born in Northern Ireland.

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M. Quetti, one of our Italian fans, wants a breakdown of Chelsea presidents over the course of our history. I'm going to list the club's chairmen as they are closer in equivalence to the European club presidents rather than the more honorary position of president here.

Chelsea FC has had 10 chairmen.

Claude Kirby 1905-35
Charles Pratt Snr 1935-36
Lt Col Charles Crisp 1936-40
Joe Mears 1940-66
Charles Pratt Jnr 1966-68
Leslie Withey 1968-69
Brian Mears 1969-81 (below)
Viscount Chelsea 1981-82
Ken Bates 1982-2003
Bruce Buck 2003-to-date

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Now some requests for match and team line-up details including a good old 'my first game' question.

Ian Plant turns the clock back to the promotion-winning 1976/77 season and his first match at Stamford Bridge against Southampton. He wonders whether the not-long-transferred Peter Osgood played for the Saints that day. He also asks about an end-of-season friendly against New York Cosmos.

Osgood was at Southampton that season but did not feature in that particular game. It was on 30 October 1976, Chelsea won 3-1 with Ted McDougall opening the scoring for the visitors with 18 minutes to go with Kenny Swain, Steve Finnieston and Ray Wilkins responding.

We didn't play New York Cosmos at the end of that season. Instead we went to the West Coast of the United States rather than the East Coast, although we did play Cosmos in a friendly at Stamford Bridge in September 1978. The result of that match was 1-1, Wilkins again on the scoresheet. Former Man City man Dennis Tueart netted for the American side and big names playing were Franz Beckenbauer and Johan Cruyff, and they had Giorgio Chinaglia up front.

He doesn't say it was his first game but Scott Arthur asks for the players involved a famous win over Spurs in 1994 when Chelsea under Glenn Hoddle were 2-0 down after 20 minutes, then 3-2 up before it went to 3-3 and Spurs had a penalty saved. Mark Stein made it 4-3 with a last-minute penalty winner.

The team was: Dmitri Kharine, Steve Clarke, Jacob Kjeldbjerg, Erland Johnsen, Mal Donaghy, Eddie Newton, Craig Burley (David Hopkin), Dennis Wise, Gavin Peacock, Mark Stein, John Spencer. Unused subs: Glenn Hoddle and Kevin Hitchcock.

Merv 'Chopper' Hallett wants the starting XI for a game between Manchester City and Chelsea on 20 January 1979 at Maine Road. The game finished 3-2 and the Chelsea goalscorers were Duncan McKenzie (below), Peter Osgood and Clive Walker.

The team was: Peter Bonetti, Graham Wilkins, David Stride, Ron Harris, Mickey Droy, Steve Wicks, Garry Stanley, Duncan McKenzie, Peter Osgood, Tommy Langley, Clive Walker.

The match was played on a snow-covered pitch.

John Dickson wants details on a war-time 6-2 defeat by West Ham on 7 December 1940. It was in the regional Football League South at Upton Park in front of a crowd of around 1000.

The Chelsea scorers were Bob Griffiths and Jackie Smith.

The team was: John Jackson, John O'Hare, George Barber, Jim Macaulay, Robert Salmond, Bob Griffiths, Dickie Spence, John Galloway, Albert Tennant, Jackie Smith, Dick Foss.

Finally for this collection of questions, Roma Gee wants to know the result of a match on 28 August 1937. It was the day Roma was born but believes there was more excitement about the Chelsea win than the birth in the family.

It was the opening day of the season and we beat Liverpool 6-1 - scorers George Mills 3, Jimmy Argue, Harry Burgess and Billy Mitchell.

And what a special day it was! It was our biggest ever win against Liverpool who had Matt Busby playing for them.

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Kazim Abbas from Bombay in India has sent in a quickie. Aware of our impressive recent home record, he asks which other team apart from Arsenal beat us in a league game at Stamford Bridge in the past few years. The answer, Kazim, is Liverpool but your email arrived before Manchester City defeated us last month, so sadly we have to add their name.

Karo from Tashkent asks why Chelsea did not participate in the first European Champions' Cup after winning the English League in 1955. The simple answer is that the Football League didn't want English clubs to enter the new European competition and instead the first European Cup was won by Real Madrid. For a far more detailed story than I have space for here I recommend chapter 17 of Chelsea: The Official Biography by my colleague Rick Glanvill.

Paul Branfield has a vague recollection of a game in the late 1970s when Tommy Langley took a shot directly from the kick off and hit the crossbar and wants to know if he is dreaming this. I have no record of this moment and Tommy has no memory of it when it was checked with him.

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Finally for this time, Patrick Gordon-Brown has emailed to ask why Chelsea appear to have problems naming the maximum size squad in the Champions League due to Uefa regulations about homegrown players, when, he points out, Inter didn't seem to despite having a squad with few Italians.

In fact the squad Inter were able to select from in our recent meeting had only one player more than Chelsea and that is because the majority of the squad has no restriction on it. The regulations apply to just eight of 25 players that can be named in what Uefa call an A-list.

For a fuller explanation I refer Patrick the details included when this season's Champions League squad was named.

As ever, if I have not dealt with your query this time then apologies but I will be back in few weeks to answer more including some that have already been sent in and hopefully some that are yet to arrive.

If you have any follow-up contributions, corrections or new statistics-related questions, please email statman@chelseafc.com