Swindon Town 0-2 Chelsea - Rate the Chelsea performance

Fernando Torres of Chelsea holds off pressure from Grant Hall of Swindon during the Capital One Cup third round match between Swindon Town and Chelsea at County Ground on September 24, 2013 in Swindon, England. (Getty Images)

Chelsea beat Swindon 2-0 tonight with the goals (above) scored in the first half by Fernando Torres and Ramires, but two injuries to Marco Van Ginkel and Ramires have us all worried ahead of Tottenham at the weekend.

It was a professional performance from the Blues and sees us through the to the next round with the draw taking place tomorrow evening.

Chelsea fielded what the media called “fringe players” tonight as Jose Mourinho made 10 changes to the side that started against Fulham. Gary Cahill was the only player to remain in the starting eleven.

Chelsea’s team:

Schwarzer, Azpilicueta, Luiz, Cahill, Betrand, Essien(c), Van Ginkel, Willian, Mata, De Bruyne and Torres.

With a team worth a reported £180m compared to Swindon’s £400,000 it was always going to be a game we expected to win especially with a team like that starting.

For me there were some stand out performers in Michael Essien and Fernando Torres and both have surely put themselves in contention for a start on Saturday at White Hart Lane. If you ask me personally, Fernando Torres gets my vote to start ahead of Samuel Eto’o anyway and if anything, his contribution to the team and as a whole was far better than anything we have seen Eto’o produce.

Essien patrolled and dominated the middle of midfield like we know he can. There were a couple of moments when we saw the Essien of old, rampaging through the middle, bursting forward with the power he has and it was good to see after all the problems he has had in recent years with his knees.

Juan Mata will feature in most of the column inches in the morning and more on him to follow from me but you can have your own say on his performance tonight. What I will say is that it was very, very noticeable how hard he was working off the ball. He may not have been perfect, but his work rate had a 100% improvement. Whether it’s enough to start ahead of Oscar, I am not so sure but credit to him for putting it in tonight.

The disappointment for me was that we never punished Swindon enough with the amount of chances we created, especially late on! Torres should have scored instead of striking the ball straight at the goalkeeper’s face when clean through in the first half and in the second half, after an impressive run from the right wing and back inside across the edge of the box, shouldn’t have hesitated and blasted the ball first time.

Kevin De Bruyne should have composed himself in the second and done better with the chance he had from a fantastic through ball from David Luiz at the beginning of the second half.

Willian was too greedy on more than one occasion, but more so with his first attempt on goal, when a square pass to the wide open Torres in front of goal was the better option. He fired wide instead and then over the bar after good work from Torres later on.

Demba Ba should have also done better with the chance he had, but fired wide in addition to Juan Mata shooting high over the bar late on.

That’s the thing at the moment with players not playing regularly isn’t it? So much focus has been put on them to impress the manager, they all want a piece of personal glory rather than play as a team in those key moments!

Like I said it was a professional performance, but if we had looked up at the right moment on more than one occasion, we could have beaten them by four, five or even six tonight!

What do you think of the performance tonight and who was your stand out player?

Carefree & KTBFFH!