In a new format for 2023/24, the winner of the Premier League 2 will be decided by a series of end-of-season play-offs.

Having secured a fourth-place finish in the regular campaign with a 2-0 win over Southampton, our Under-21s kick off the play-offs with a home last-16 tie against Brighton & Hove Albion at Kingsmeadow.

Looking ahead to this evening's match, which begins at 7pm, Robinson underlined why he is happy to be going into the play-offs after a win and good performance by his young side against the Saints.

'Firstly, we’re pleased that the lads finished fourth,' he said. 'Being Chelsea, obviously, we always want to come top in everything, but with the age of the group this year we think it’s no mean achievement that we finished fourth.

'So that was pleasing, although we know it could have been better.

'There are always things you want to do better but in terms of our intensity and our hunger to implement our style, against Southampton it was a million miles away from the Fulham performance before it. So that’s what we’ll be looking for again.'

Although it is a relatively young Chelsea side at Under-21s level this season, the players have gained plenty of knockout football experience during the current campaign.

There have been several excellent performances in the cup competitions but also painful exits.

At this level, we suffered a narrow defeat to a vastly more experienced PSV Eindhoven in the quarter-finals of the Premier League International Cup, then a disappointing heavy loss to Fulham in the semis of the domestic Premier League Cup.

Several players likely to be involved against Brighton will have also featured in our FA Youth Cup run, which Millwall in the last eight after a penalty shootout. And Robinson believes they will have gained valuable experience of the fine margins involved in knockout football.

'We now go into a situation where you must win, there are no second chances,' he continued. 'Obviously coming up short in a semi-final already, we want to overcome that challenge in a must-win game.

'The Under-18s experienced that in the FA Youth Cup, we experienced it against PSV - which, to be fair, we thought was a pretty good performance but we were undone by a poor decision to give them a penalty. And then Fulham was nowhere near good enough by us.

'The group on Friday will be a real mixture. We’ll have a lot of Under-18s in the group who will have experienced that FA Youth Cup pain, so we’re looking to see how much they’ve grown in that situation where there is no second chance in a must-win game.'

However, our chances will be slightly complicated as the Chelsea Academy continues to be a victim of its success. While Robinson and his staff are always pleased to see their players involved with the men's team, as was the case last night against Tottenham, it does create challenges.

He explained: 'We’ve got a lot of lads with the first team at the moment - which is always a real positive thing, not a negative thing at all - but it does mean we’ll have no preparation together as a team.

'So that makes things a little bit more interesting, but then the players have got to come together on Friday and put in the kind of performance we know they’re capable of, to get the win.'