The Blues had been in a good vein of form going into Saturday’s Premier League fixture at Stamford Bridge, with wins over Liverpool and Nottingham Forest in that competition combined with UEFA Champions League victories against Benfica and Ajax in west London.

However, despite taking an early lead with Alejandro Garnacho’s first goal for the club, we weren’t able to extend that run. Sunderland scrambled in an equaliser midway through the first half and then, after parking the bus to withstand long spells of Chelsea pressure, the visitors snatched a winner in added time.

Given the impressive win over reigning champions Liverpool in our last home league game, and the 3-0 thrashing of Forest last time out in the competition, Maresca was left to reflect on our inability to maintain the level we had shown in recent weeks.

‘If you want to be up there you need the consistency,’ he said. ‘We won four in a row and yesterday we could have shown that, but because we lost points we didn’t show that.

‘If we can have that level and this level, probably it is better to have something in between, to be consistent always in the same way, rather than like this. But I think overall, since we started, we have performed much better compared to Saturday’s game.

‘Before this game we had exactly the same points as last year after eight games, but we dropped points yesterday. But we are still in October, we need to improve many things, and see where we are in March, April, May.’

However, there were extenuating circumstances to Saturday’s painful defeat, with Maresca explaining that some members of his squad have been playing through the pain to try to help the team while being hampered by injury issues.

‘Joao [Pedro] is not training every day because he is managing himself a little bit from a groin injury problem. Moi [Caicedo] is exactly the same, Enzo [Fernandez] is exactly the same.

‘We have four or five players that unfortunately, because they have some problems, they cannot work every day and they try to make the effort to play the game.

‘Joao in some games has been better, on Saturday he struggled a bit. But yesterday I think all the players struggled, so it’s not just about Joao.’

The focus for Maresca and his players will now be recovering in time to bounce back from this defeat in midweek, when we travel to Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Carabao Cup, before next Saturday’s Premier League derby trip to Tottenham Hotspur.