The skipper started the match for only the second time this season after recovering from a knee injury sustained in the summer and was substituted for Aggie Beever-Jones after 74 minutes with the Blues chasing a goal.

Despite our best efforts, it was not to be, and Cuthbert gave her thoughts after the final whistle.

She said: 'We did really well at getting ourselves ahead in the first half. That’s been our target: to score early, and then we conceded an unfortunate goal, which is no one’s fault. But we need to do a little bit more.

'We weren’t quite on the same page today defensively. We weren’t pressing as a group, as we have done in the previous games. We were a bit sloppy on the ball, too.

'But I can’t fault anybody’s effort. The effort has been there. It’s just one of those days where we were really not at it, and we can’t have too many of those if we want to be in a title race.'

The teams went in with the scores at 1-1 during the interval after a Lucy Bronze own goal had cancelled out Sandy Baltimore's opener. Everton could then afford to sit back during the second half, meaning Chelsea were stuck trying to find a winner.

'You can’t get too stressed,' Cuthbert explained. 'I feel like as players we tend to look at scoreboards and things start to slip away. But you’ll always get a chance, and we had a few half-chances here and there today. We were dangerous on set pieces. We obviously scored from Katie's (McCabe) cross as well.

'But you have games where you just grind out results. You don’t always have to be at your best throughout the whole season, as long as you’re getting the results. But we didn’t have that today, and we can’t have too many more of those.'

There is very little time for the team to linger over today's result, with a trip to Sweden on the horizon and a game against Hacken on Tuesday night. As captain, Cuthbert will take responsibility for lifting the spirits and making sure we are ready for that challenge, before returning to Stamford Bridge to face Manchester City next weekend.

'There’s going to be a reaction, for sure,' she said. 'There’s a lot of unhappy people in the dressing room, and rightly so, because this is a club that expects to win games of football. But just the quality was lacking for us today, myself included. If we all looked at ourselves in the dressing room, we all know that we could have done a lot better today.

'I’m sure that we’ll be back at training tomorrow, ready and fully focused on Hacken. We will make sure that we put our best foot forward come Tuesday night.'