The hosts were gifted a couple of their goals in E20 after Edouard Mendy conceded a penalty and then Arthur Masuaka beat the Senegal stopper with an unlikely mishit cross late on.

It condemned Chelsea to a first defeat in any competition since late September and left Loftus-Cheek scratching his head about how the points slipped away, particularly given the visitors led at the interval.

‘I thought we played really well in the first half and we were in control of the game,’ he said after the game.

‘Even in the second half, I felt in control for the majority of it so it’s confusing coming off thinking how we’ve lost that given how dominant we felt.

‘We just have the feeling of “how can we play like that and lose?” We’ve come to a tough stadium to play in, taken control of the game and at half-time we’re thinking we just need to do that again and if we play like that the chances are we’ll score more but the second half was slightly different so it’s a bit confusing really.’

Making his third successive start, the 25-year-old was heavily involved throughout, registering the third-highest amount of touches in the game and as many successful take-ons as the West Ham team combined.

However, our number 12 felt lapses of concentration and individual errors proved costly once again, insisting that the team must quickly rid themselves of such issues in order to regain form at a critical time in the season.

‘It’s just a case of mistakes and luck for them. We’ve had a few mistakes over the past couple of games that we’ve never had before and sometimes it happens in football.

‘The one thing that’s hurt us recently is individual mistakes and lapses of concentration so it’s nothing about the way we’re playing. We’re dominating games the majority of the time so I’m sure we’re just in a phase that we need to snap out of very quickly.

‘We need to have better concentration because we want to get points from games like this, especially when we dominate games.’