There was a moment’s silence before the start of the game, not that you’d have noticed. Matchdays at Stamford Bridge these days dawn with a curious mixture of fascination and foreboding: roughly akin to the sensation of sitting down in a restaurant that has a 3.3 rating on Google Maps. Nobody really knows what to expect any more. None of the old benchmarks of quality seem to apply. What constitutes success amid the permanent concussion of post-Abramovich Chelsea? Top four? A sense of stylistic progress? An unchanged starting XI?
In this respect, it was tempting to suggest that these 104…
