Chelsea's mini-revival came to a shuddering halt with Tuesday's 1-0 defeat at Championship side Middlesbrough in the Carabao Cup semi-final first leg, another game in which Mauricio Pochettino's side were desperately short of cutting edge, verve and identity.
The Blues should still be confident of overturning the deficit back at Stamford Bridge on January 23, but the evening in the freezing north-east was another bleak occasion for Pochettino, his team and supporters — many of whom were left frustrated by the lack of acknowledgement from the players afterwards.
Chelsea's brief uptick had consisted of wins over struggling Crystal Palace, Luton and second-tier Preston in the FA Cup but, as ever with this iteration of the Blues, any sense of momentum was short-lived.
It is now 18 months since Clearlake Capital's takeover, and Chelsea last won more than three games in a row in all competitions back in October 2022, a run consisting of nine matches unbeaten immediately following the appointment of Graham Potter.
It felt, at the time, like a promising start to a new era — the new owners settled in and now with their own man in the dugout — but Potter was sacked in April last year after losing 11 of his next 22 games in charge.
The mild-mannered former Brighton coach left west London as something of a punchline, amid the sense he had taken on a job simply too big for him.
Looking back, perhaps it is time for some revisionism of Potter's tenure or an acknowledgement he was way down the list of problems at Chelsea.
Without question there is a compelling case that Potter was operating in far tougher set of circumstances than those in which Pochettino is floundering today.
Unlike Pochettino, who joined Chelsea on July 1, Potter pitched up at the club in September, as Thomas Tuchel's successor, without a pre-season with the players and no say in the club's incomings and outgoings of the previous window. He also had a Champions League group stage to navigate — which he did with impressive composure, leading Chelsea to top spot without losing a game — leaving the coach with limited time on the training ground to work with his new charges.
Then there was the unprecedented disruption of a mid-season World Cup and the owners' spending spree of more than £320million last January, both of which destabilised Chelsea's season which had shown some cautious promise.
Potter was left with a bloated and unbalanced squad for the second half of the campaign. More generally, a permanent sense of chaos engulfed Chelsea for the entirety of his seven months in charge as Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali asserted their authority on the club and adjusted to English football. They sacked most of the medical staff, entered the dressing room unannounced and occasionally spoke unhelpfully in public.
While a strong element of mayhem still lingers at Stamford Bridge, Pochettino, by contrast, is dealing with more stable conditions.
The owners have calmed down (somewhat), the squad is smaller and was shaped by the manager to a far greater degree than Potter's, and Pochettino has no European football to contend with, allowing for plenty of time on the training ground to improve his expensive but callow recruits.
And yet, while Chelsea have improved under the former Tottenham boss, certainly from the doldrums of Frank Lampard's disastrous interregnum, their gains have been so marginal as to count for little.
What progress Chelsea have made this season — and they have produced some exhilarating attacking football at times, and lost just one of five games against the rest of the so-called 'big six' — can be put down as much to the Blues simply settling down as a club as the impact of the head coach.
Certainly, after some signs of promise in pre-season and early in the campaign, notably against Liverpool on the opening day, Chelsea do not feel like a Pochettino team should: a band of brothers, lean, hungry, high-pressing and exhilarating to watch.
Where is the personality, the identity, the tactical progression?
Perhaps, in the end, neither Potter nor Pochettino are the right coaches for this project, or maybe Chelsea are simply an impossible job in their current state; a club which seems to have locked itself in a permanent loop of needing to buy players to improve, while needing to sell its most promising youngsters to spend.
Whatever the case, to this point Pochettino has been held to different standards than Potter — maybe understandably so, given his fine body of work at Spurs.
With the home game against Boro and an FA Cup fourth-round clash, also at home, with Aston Villa sandwiched between League games against local rivals Fulham and Liverpool, Pochettino is facing a crucial period to rebuild momentum and ensure Chelsea's season does not unravel.
If the Blues continue to flatline, Pochettino could soon find himself under the same degree of pressure faced by Potter, despite being dealt a much kinder hand.
