Neto brace masks a grim night for Everton

Chelsea needed a response after the international break and got one fast. Pedro Neto scored twice as Chelsea moved to fourth in the Premier League, their first clean sheet since January according to The Guardian, which also carried the full match report. On a day when Chelsea's shape and composure were the story for the first hour, it was Martínez's head injury that changed everything else.

The game stopped after Martínez went down and stayed down. Medical staff worked on him for seven minutes before deciding he needed to leave on a stretcher, a passage of play that drained the stadium of any sense that this was just another Saturday fixture. The Guardian's report does not detail the mechanism of the injury or confirm a concussion diagnosis, and Flagside will not speculate on either.

Chelsea finally look like themselves

Before the stoppage, Chelsea had been the better side by some distance. Neto's double did the damage, and the clean sheet matters just as much: Chelsea had not kept one since January, a stretch that had quietly become a problem given the expectation around this squad.

Fourth place, 13 points from seven games, is exactly where this group should expect to be at this stage. The result against Everton is the kind of away win that builds belief rather than announcing a transformation, but after a shaky run it is the first marker Chelsea can point to with real conviction.

A match nobody wanted to finish talking about

Football has a habit of getting back to business quickly after moments like these, and this one did too: the game restarted, Chelsea saw it out, three points went in the book. But seven minutes of treatment on a football pitch is seven minutes that tends to silence a crowd far more than any away goal does.

Everton have not yet put out detail on Martínez's condition beyond what was visible on the pitch, and nothing here should be read as a diagnosis. What's clear is that this was a day Chelsea's players will describe as a good away win, and one Everton's dressing room will remember for an entirely different reason.