IT WAS hardly an appropriate moment for an injection of humour, however black, but there was more than a flicker of a smile crawling across Ruud Gullit's face when asked to pass judgment on Liverpool.

Presumably he felt he had already done so by way of an articulate and meticulously-structured monologue which had so accurately detailed the downfall of his team.

Clearly, Gull it felt the two to be irresistibly interwoven.

Liverpool looked good, indeed, appeared to be far more impressive than they actually were, simply because Chelsea were so wretched, the shortcomings of one amplifying the attributes of the other.

"If you give them all the room they want, of course they will play well," Gullit said.

The inference was that Liverpool had done no more than take what they were offered and from a neutral standpoint at least, that argument held more water than it leaked. Any competent Premiership side would have mauled Chelsea on Saturday and it just happened to be Liverpool's good fortune to be in the right place at the right time.

"We played more against ourselves than we did against Liverpool," repeated the Chelsea manager four times in less than five minutes.

Gullit was actually a relieved man. He said as much. A crushing first defeat of the season had removed the burden of expectation which had begun to make weary even the most cultured of foreign legs. Just as he had hinted all along, Chelsea were not going to win the title after all.

"Maybe we needed this to show people that we not yet where we want to be. There is still much hard work to be done," he said.

By a distance, Gullit's performance was more impressive than that of his team. Chelsea no longer entertain thoughts of containment even away from Stamford Bridge but an ability to spot the difference between a situation which still holds promise and one which has become a lost cause is crucial.

Even when they were three, then four goals adrift, Chelsea could not find the commonsense to shelve their cavalier approach in order to plug the gap in midfield through which Liverpool were gunning down over-ambition engendered by the use of three forwards.

Even the Liverpool manager Roy Evans conceded that his side was a poor second-best early on, but once the absolutely immaculate Matteo had got the measure, of the woeful and unforgivably bill-tempered Vialli the die was cast.

After Robbie Fowler had emerged from between two defenders to head in Bjornebye's marvellous cross and Patrik Berger had capped Matteo's surging break from midfield with a clinical striker's finish, Chelsea were done for.

Liverpool's progress was always the more impressive because despite starting with just one forward, Fowler, they tended to attack in great numbers from all directions.

With Vialli content to fall about like a pantomime dame in search of free-kicks and sympathy, the responsibility for ruffling Liverpool's plumage fell to Hughes who was an impressive enough contributor until he, too, was enveloped by the red mist.

Liverpool added further goals whenever Chelsea's generosity eclipsed their instinct for self-preservation. Andy Myers, with a spectacular headed own-goal, Berger again and John Barnes placed clear daylight between the sides.