Eight games without a win and, most damning of all, now below Manchester United in the Premier League table. This isn’t anything like the continued upward mobility Aston Villa would have hoped for this season, is it?

Instead, their downward trajectory is stark and worrying. They have gone from winning four of their first five league games and sitting top of the Champions League table, to looking a bit flat, to now often looking outright dreadful for long spells of games. After taking deserved plaudits for his side’s form last season, Unai Emery is now facing troubling questions about how to stop the rot.

For Chelsea, this was as routine as routine wins can get. Enzo Maresca’s decision to switch his side abruptly to a 3-4-2-1 rather than the usual 4-2-3-1 was a bold gambit from a side already in decent enough form, and insofar as it needed to, it worked exactly as intended.

Aston Villa’s flat 4-3-3-becoming-4-4-2 out of possession did not seem quite sure how to deal with Chelsea splitting their midfield in between the two lines (Romeo Lavia and Moises Caicedo deeper, Cole Palmer and Enzo Fernandez ahead). Meanwhile, a back three of Marc Cucurella, Levi Colwill and Wesley Fofana offered the required protection to Villa’s tendency to break forward in numbers.

But Chelsea’s victory actually had less to do with any tactical considerations, and far more to do with just how abysmally foggy-headed Villa looked throughout the first half. They went behind to Marc Cucurella winning a challenge just outside the box of Jaden Philogene, the young buck Nicolas Jackson finishing superbly off the post.

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Ollie Watkins could have squared to give Morgan Rogers a tap-in after getting past Fofana to get one-on-one with Robert Sanchez, but despite seeing the keeper bearing down on him to narrow the angle and put himself in no man’s land should the Villa man have passed it, he opted to shoot straight at the goalkeeper.

Cole Palmer forced Emiliano Martinez into a save after repeating Cucurella’s earlier edge-of-the-box robbery, with Martinez and Pau Torres conspiring to hand Chelsea a backpass offence when either one of them simply booting it into the stands would have been entirely normal and acceptable behaviour.

Chelsea’s second goal was, in fairness, simply excellent. Just like his Leicester side last season, Maresca’s side were deceptively patient, regularly passing it across the back three on halfway but ready to spring into action to exploit the slightest hint of an opening.

When Colwill’s forward ball was cut out and led to a bit of pinball on the edge of the Villa third, Chelsea found the gaps they needed. Villa had been pulled out of position, and Palmer and Fernandez knew their roles, pushing in between the lines and combing as Palmer teed up Fernandez for a well-taken effort from the edge of the box.

It’s easy and possibly just a little bit fair to put that difference in crispness between the two sides to their respective European commitments. Villa should be used to the additional scheduling load of playing in Europe having reached the semi-finals of the Conference League last season, but there is a world of difference in the toll taken by a meeting with Zrinjkski Mosta and taking on the likes of Bayern Munich and Juventus.

But it feels like there’s more to it than that – especially as Emery, a four-time Europa League winner, should know better than most managers how to manage that workload.

It wasn’t just that Villa were making a bit off the pace, a bit leggy, and not even that they were just making poor decisions. They actually looked to be going out of the way to do the very stupidest thing they possibly could at every opportunity. They were Sideshow Bob, surrounded by rakes, exhaustedly sloping around from one to the next to receive self-imposed whack to the face after self-imposed whack to the face.

The second half was boringly solid, but nothing more than that; that the result was going Chelsea’s way was already beyond any reasonable doubt, with Palmer’s late strike into the top corner making it a certainty.

We know that Emery’s sides are capable of putting together extended runs of good form, but the manager is yet to definitively prove he can also be the man to get a side through a bad spell and out the other side. That’s the job he has on his hands now.

His failure to do so at Arsenal despite a promising start cost him his job there, and you wonder just how much patience the Aston Villa board will have even for a manager who led them to a top four finish last season if he can’t put back together the pieces from their slow but undeniable implosion.

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