N’Golo Kanté made a glorious, wondergoal-scoring return to the starting lineup on Sunday, but Chelsea still fell short of league leaders Liverpool. It wasn’t so much the defeat itself — they are clearly a level above still — but the manner of the defeat that was so frustrating, with the Blues giving away cheap goals on set pieces and failing to convert any of our good chances in front of goal.

And while Kanté was happy to be back fit and happy to score a goal, he doesn’t believe Chelsea are where we want to be, and correctly so.

“It is not a great start, we have work to do. We are not where we want to be but we can fight and change this in the next games.”

It’s not all bad of course. There are promising signs everywhere, even if they’ve yet to congeal into a win at Stamford Bridge. Maybe on Wednesday then against Grimsby Town? Surely that must be a long-awaited first home win for Frank Lampard as manager!

Kanté seems confident enough that Chelsea will reap the rewards of this process, especially if we manage to keep spirits and confidence at a high level.

“We tried our best during the game and we are disappointed by the result. With the two set-pieces they scored they put us in difficulty but had some good chances. As soon as they scored to make it 2-0, we went in the changing room believing all together that we can do it... “The first one was a beautiful goal but the second one we maybe could do better but at the end, we played well, we tried to come back but the set-pieces meant Liverpool won. “We played very well in the second half. We were able to score one but not to equalise, but there were some good points in the performance and we need to take those points on to have a good result in the next game. If we keep working this way we can get a win in our next game.” -N’Golo Kanté; source: Chelsea FC

Let’s hope so!