Chelsea face incredibly difficult test against Leeds who have the quality and desire to win at Stamford Bridge – Talk Chelsea

Chelsea’s season hangs by a thread after defeat in the EFL Cup.

They’re wallowing in mid table in the Premier League, seemingly unable to reach higher than 8th or lower than 14th. Their last hope of glory is the FA Cup, and our next game in that competition comes up on Wednesday, before the dust has even settled on the league cup final defeat’s fallout.

Online betting will tell you that we’re overwhelming favourites for the game against Leeds – but we wouldn’t agree at all.

We’re at home, sure. And we did well on the way to the League Cup final by dispatching lower league opposition along the way. But Leeds are a different matter. They’re a Premier League team in Championship team clothing. Their front line is fearsome, and they’re full of confidence and a desperate desire to prove themselves against the big boys again.

Daniel Farke’s team are flying in the second tier – they’ve won 6 in a row, and haven’t lost in their last 12 games. They will also likely be extremely confident that their quality will carry them to automatic promotion, so the FA Cup is not something they’re looking to throw away – quite the opposite in fact.

And that’s before you even get to their historic rivalry against us. We haven’t played the Whites in the FA Cup since the 1970 final, one of the most infamous games in English football history. It’s hardly a fresh and open wound, but all that time has only added to the buildup.

How will our players react to the defeat at Wembley? That’s another mystery factor when predicting this game. They could be inspired and motivated to come out and show all the doubters that they’re wrong. But this is a young, inexperienced and potentially mentally fragile group. They seem to really like Mauricio Pochettino, but is he going to be able to pick them up off the floor mentally after such an obvious bottling? It’s hard to say.

This team is hard enough to predict at the best of times – the lack of a consistent finisher means we go into every game not knowing if it will be a stroll or a battle. And that goes for every game, whether we’re playing Middlesbrough or Man City.

So the idea that this isn’t a very even game is just plain wrong. If we’re at our best, we should have too much for them. But how often have we been at our best this season?