Chelsea were leapfrogged by Brighton into sixth place and must brace themselves for a host of teams below them to follow suit after a torrid night.
A 3-0 defeat at the Amex left head coach Liam Rosenior under immediate pressure.
It is the first time Chelsea have lost five consecutive league games without scoring a single goal in any of them since an equally dreadful run all the way back in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, and Rosenior may find himself now thrashing around to keep afloat in the days ahead.
Champions League hopes all but over
Mathematically, it is not over, but realistically, the die is now cast — Chelsea’s Champions League pursuit suffered its final, terminal, hammer blow on the south coast.
The manner of the defeat will have been as hard to take for Rosenior and the board members sat in the directors’ box who must now consider his future as anything else.
Brighton were comfortably the better team from minute one until the very last of the action. It was a spineless performance from the Blues, who face the very real risk now of missing out on European football altogether.
Brighton leapfrogged Chelsea into sixth place in the table and now sit two points behind the seventh-place Blues.
Alongside Chelsea on 48 points are Brentford and Bournemouth, with Everton on 47, Sunderland on 46 and Fulham on 45. Every single one of those five teams now has a game in hand on the misfiring west Londoners. Crystal Palace, on 43 points, have two.
‘Barbergate’ the latest controversy
In an extraordinary turn of events, rumours began circulating on Tuesday morning that Joao Pedro had failed his last fitness test and that Cole Palmer would also miss the game.
What had happened was incredible. Marc Cucurella’s barber had got hold of the information and shared it on social media, offering it as his “exclusive”, before promptly deleting it and no doubt regretting his actions.
When the starting line-up did finally land and both were absent, it became clear the barber’s information was correct — and that some stern words about the latest mole within the camp might now need to be had. Especially given how the evening unfolded from there.
The opposition team is getting the majority of the day of the game to let that team news sink in… Rosenior must feel everything is going against him right now.
Change of system a catastrophic failure
Rosenior changed things up given the absences and that meant starting with a back three. Chelsea could not have started worse, with Ferdi Kadioglu giving Brighton the lead almost immediately and Chelsea getting worse before they got better.
When they did get better, it was marginal, and it was no surprise Rosenior hooked the yellow-carded Wesley Fofana, introduced Alejandro Garnacho (which had very little impact, as it happened) and switched to the more trusted 4-2-3-1 formation for the start of the second half.
But a brutal Brighton counter, helped by a Jorrel Hato error, meant Brighton were soon 2-0 up.
When late substitute Danny Welbeck scored the third in stoppage time, there were very few boos aimed the way of Rosenior or Chelsea — because many of the Blues’ travelling fans had already left.
