The Swans perfect start to the season is over but not before they gave title favourites a real fright at Stamford Bridge this afternoon although a Diego Costa hat-trick was enough to keep Chelsea top of the table this evening.

As difficult fixtures go, Chelsea at Stamford Bridge is one of the most difficult ones we will encounter this season and so it proved but only after we completely controlled the game for the opening twenty minutes and deservedly led at that point in time thanks to John Terry turning Neil Taylor's cross into his own net.

It could have been so much better for us at that point in time with Routledge and Gomis both coming close as the Swans shocked Chelsea with the ease in which we managed to pass the ball around during that period and it was complete silence from the home fans as the Swans showed that our start to the season was no flash in the pan.

It is thoughts of this that we need to take into the coming games and not the final scoreline as two of Chelsea's summer signings - Costa and Fabregas cut through the Swansea defence who will not be the only defence to suffer at the hands of these two this season.

It could possibly have been so different had we managed to hold on until half time rather than conceding in the last minute of the first half to a Costa header after we left him almost unmarked at a corner but we will never know whether things will be different but at 1-1 half time Chelsea definitely went into the break with some fresh impetus which they may not have had if we had retained that 1--0 lead.

We never really recovered from that equaliser and we can have no complaints at the way that Chelsea continued to push on in the second half and two more goals from Costa and one from Remy put some real distance between the two sides before Shelvey pulled one back as the game entered its closing stages.

Don't get this one wrong we still had chances - a late one for Bony and a good one for Gomis before he went off but had we got anything from the game it would not have reflected the pattern of the play and the better team won this game. And having watched Chelsea there will be better teams than us beaten by them this season and that is by no way written with any criticism of us just a reflection of how good this Chelsea side have become.

We now sit with nine points from twelve which anybody would have taken at the start of the season and with Southampton, Sunderland and Newcastle next to come for us we could have significantly more than that before the next international break. If we could go into that with at least six more points then the table would look almost as healthy as it does for us this evening.

What we learned from today was that we are not a bad team and we can play with and worry the best of them when we are on the top of our game and it is great to see us attacking the good teams again and taking the game to them rather than the defensive way that we approached this kind of fixture for large parts of last season.

Onwards to next week's home game with Southampton where I will be completely confident that we will return to winning ways.

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