The young winger was introduced at half-time during our 3-1 defeat at the Emirates Stadium as we attempted to fight back after the break and his performance was one of the few positives from our Boxing Day fixture.

Although we were not able to salvage anything from the match, our performance did improve in the second half, and Hudson-Odoi felt we were finding a way back into the game before conceding a third when what was possibly a wayward Arsenal cross went in off the back post.

‘At 2-0 down you come into the game and you’re thinking how you can impact the game and how you can try to change the scoreline around,’ he said. ‘So in my head I just wanted to give the best I could and try to change the game around.

‘It was unfortunate that they got another goal, but at 3-0 we still looked confident to push to try to get at least a draw back. We kept pushing until the end but unfortunately we could not get the result.’

However, that second half improvement could not disguise the painful defeat we suffered in the London derby, and Hudson-Odoi says the players are feeling the responsibility for their drop in performance and pinpoints a lack of urgency as one of the issues that cost us against the Gunners.

‘It feels like we let ourselves down,’ he explained. ‘We know that we can do much better than we did. We should have put the same energy we had in the second half into the first half as well. We should have had the same attitude from the get-go and pushed all the way through the 90 minutes. So we’re really disappointed in ourselves.

‘We started too slow, we all know that. We knew from the start it was going to be a difficult game no matter what. They’re Arsenal, they’re a good team. We wanted to come out here and try and get the three points but unfortunately we didn’t.

‘We know that we started slow. In the second half we tried better to come out faster. We were unfortunate to concede another goal, because we got ourselves kind of back in it, but we need to push harder and keep working harder to get the three points.’

With a quick turnaround for our next Premier League fixture, when we host Aston Villa at Stamford Bridge, Hudson-Odoi says the squad will be back at Cobham using the short time to try and put things right for that match.

‘We’ve got to reflect on ourselves between now and Monday and hopefully we’ll bounce back in that game. We know we could have done better in every aspect, but we’ve got to go back to the training ground and try to work on everything we did wrong.’

He also insists the mentality among the squad means they will never give up on our chances of winning silverware, while the pain of defeat spurs them on to be better next time.

‘No matter where we are in the league we’re going to keep pushing until we get to number one and no matter what the game is, we’re Chelsea, we want to give our best every game no matter what and hopefully keep rising up the table. Every opponent we play against we want to try and get the three points, score goals, concede less. We’re going to keep pushing until the last day. No matter what, we’ll keep pushing.

‘We’re all disappointed every time we lose. We don’t like losing. That’s the Chelsea mentality, we always want to win games. So when we do lose or we make a couple of mistakes in games, we’re all disappointed with ourselves. When we win we’re always happy, when we lose we’re disappointed, so we want to get back to winning ways and stay happy.’