Devastated Villa boss Martin O’Neill openly admitted that his team’s capitulation at Chelsea had brought him one of his blackest moments in football.

The claret and blues’ 7-1 hammering by Chelsea shocked not just the manager and the fans who witnessed it, but the rest of the Premier League which has come to regard the team’s defensive solidity as one of the cornerstones of the team.

He said: “I’ve been in this game a long time now and it is always teaching you lessons. But this is as bad a day as I can remember. I am devastated.

“We were well beaten, well beaten by a very fine team although I have to say that the way we competed in the latter part of the game, a team from the Fourth Division would have beaten us.

“We certainly didn’t help ourselves at all and at half-time I don’t think anybody would have seen that coming.

“But we allowed ourselves to go from the possibility of equalising the game 2-2 to go to 3-1, and for some obscure reason we just capitulated.

“We conceded ground, we conceded possession and conceded goals. Chelsea were rampant at the end.”

O’Neill side-stepped questions about whether or not he thought fatigue in the squad was at the heart of Villa’s demise.

He said: “This is the main part of the season, we’ve been going for a long time now, but that doesn’t really matter.

“Before the game I know that we made a couple of changes in the side to freshen things up a little bit but generally speaking the players were in fine fettle before.”

Instead the manager was merely left to reflect on a dreadful afternoon for the club – one which may well carry an impact into the FA Cup semi-final between the same teams in a fortnight.

He said: “We were well beaten. At 3-1 we capitulated which is unlike us. It was a tough lesson to take. We have not conceded too many goals this season, but we have been well and truly hammered on this occasion.

“We have the same opposition in a fortnight and we will need to do an awful lot better. I would not have seen it coming at half-time, despite the concession of a late penalty, we were well and truly in the game.

“We have to fight back and we intend to do so, but we have to put some things in perspective and we were well beaten by a top-quality team.

“But from our own viewpoint, that was not good enough. In terms of finishing fourth? On that performance we would not finish 44th.

“It’s as devastating as I have felt in the game. I have been in the game as a player and manager for some considerable time and you get taught quite a few lessons along the way, but that was as tough as any.

“We did not compete and that is something I could not level at the team too many times this season.”