These are tough times at the moment and nobody, including the manager, is pretending it is anything other than difficult just now. We have got used to a level of success over the last few decades and it is a rare thing to find the Blues this far down the Premier League table this far into the season.

I mentioned last week about our defence being pretty solid in the league and to be fair, we still have the fourth-fewest goals against, so any panic about the four goals lost in the FA Cup against Man City is probably a bit of a red herring. A youthful backline that included Lewis Hall, Trevoh Chalobah and Bashir Humphreys, alongside Kepa and Kalidou Koulibaly, were always going to be severely tested against the quality City had.

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Reece James, Thiago Silva and Ben Chilwell, and going back to last season Toni Rudiger, have over 200 caps between them for some of the best nations in the world, but most of their absences were enforced due to injuries or much-needed rest. The backline on Sunday was not so well-endowed with caps and experience it is fair to say. It is a lot of quality to have lost over a short period at this level.

Even if the defence did ship four on Sunday, the real dilemma seems to be with creation at the moment. We did rely heavily on James and Chilwell, particularly when we favoured the 3-4-3 formation, and they are a great loss right now, a loss that would affect any team. Further forward however, this is the main riddle that has to be solved. Three of our last eight games have been 1-0 defeats so it is not as if we need a huge amount of goals to turn things around, just a few.

Manipulating situations

Seeking the simplest answer for lack of goals, people usually look at the strikers and plenty have been doing that this week, but if you look at the stats, the striker, whoever it is up top, has been getting limited clear goalscoring opportunities, so we need to up the creative numbers in this area for us to be back competing at the top. Graham Potter will be working on this challenging problem.

We doubtless have creative players in Christian Pulisic, Hakim Ziyech, Kai Havertz, Mason Mount and Raheem Sterling to name a few, but somehow we have to manipulate situations to get them onto the ball in the right areas, with good support.

I know this feeling well from my own career. You can be in the best form of your life but if you don’t get enough of the ball in the right areas at the right times, it is incredibly hard to be effective. Others may decry your statistics about making chances, but you always know as a creative that you are totally reliant on that service.

So it is a bit of a chicken or egg situation and we know humans have taken a long time trying to work out that conundrum. It turns out it is much more complicated than either/or! And this of course will be the same with our current dip, it will not be one single, easy-to-fix problem but something more complicated and fiddly.

Managers are there to find the problem and then find a solution and I suspect Graham has not only done a lot of thinking but will have a few ideas too. A number of these ideas will however necessitate having his best players back available, fit and on form.

The run of injuries to important players has been difficult to deal with, but that is the business and you still have to find solutions. That is probably why the team at the end of the FA Cup game against Manchester City looked so different. The manager will need to know what players will be able to do a job for him and how soon. Benoit Badiashile could well be the next one to try, maybe even as soon as Thursday.

Willian and co.

Thursday night itself will be a tough evening as Fulham will be licking their lips at the chance to have a go at their neighbours. The fact they are three points and three places above us in the league, and they are on a great run of form, underlines that we will have to be at our very best if we are going to beat them and go level with them.

Hopefully this is just the game our lads need, a very local derby and a Fulham side that will not be intent on sitting back and playing on the break. We have found it difficult to score goals and create chances against that sort of style, so hopefully the way Fulham will play will be in our favour.

Not in our favour is the fact Willian has also come into a good run of form of late. Whatever happens with our former star on Thursday, there is no doubt he will get a decent reception from the Chelsea fans. He may have blotted his copybook in some people's eyes by signing for Arsenal, but he will forever be one of ours really.

I would like to finish on another former favourite, the much-loved Chelsea legend Gianluca Vialli. Some players are adored by their clubs and even loved by their countries, but not that many find themselves not only respected but loved throughout the world of football too.

Luca was one of those few. He was classy in every imaginable sense of the word on and off the field, and the loveliest person to boot.

He will always be remembered as a great player, player-manager and manager who was crucial in the period that Chelsea was becoming a world-class club. Everyone who met him, however briefly, remembers doing so, because of the gentleman he was. Goodbye Luca, you were taken from us too soon and every Chelsea fan misses you. Thank you for what you did for the club.