This was no freakish blip on the chart of an otherwise impressive season for Villa.

It was an accident waiting to happen and the scale of the damage must surely force manager Martin O’Neill to re-assess both his squad and the way he uses it, if he is ever going to break through the sixth-place ceiling.

Villa’s core group of players have been flogged to a standstill and a resurgent Chelsea wasted no time using them as Stamford Bridge traffic cones while running up this humiliating scoreline.

The magnitude of the defeat was so huge that the statisticians are still trying to come to terms with where it stands in the club’s museum of horrors.

It was certainly Villa’s most humiliating experience of the Premier League years, the first time the team have shipped seven since a 1964 hammering by Manchester United, in which Denis Law took on the four-goal role Frank Lampard occupied on Saturday.

But it’s what it says about the future that should really worry the club.

O’Neill is very prickly about the ‘M’ word – March – the month that has marked a decline in his team’s results in each of the four seasons he has orchestrated at the club.

The manager abruptly ended his post-Wolves press conference a week earlier when questioned by a reporter about the trend, grumbling as he exited the room. On that occasion, O’Neill had a point as his team’s victory at Wigan had been conveniently overlooked to pursue the line of questioning.

Nevertheless, the image of a Villa side which has so much to commend it now spluttering to a standstill at the very moment the crunch games are arriving cannot be obliterated by a manager strop, no matter how justified.

“We knew Villa would tire after 55-60 minutes and that if we kept passing the ball, spaces would appear and chances would come,” said Chelsea captain John Terry, perhaps not realising quite how accurately he had put his finger on the big gripe among fans now undermining O’Neill’s stewardship.

The Villa boss has made frequent references to having this season assembled a squad of greater depth and more capable of sustaining the multi-trophy challenges, but remains the most reluctant employer of the support personnel when it comes to game time, which suggests he is not quite as confident of their abilities as he would have us believe.

Thus we have players such as James Milner, Richard Dunne, Stiliyan Petrov, Gabby Agbonlahor and Ashley Young – the hardcore group of the O’Neill regime – either playing through injury niggles or just plain fatigue.

O’Neill finally removed a labouring Carlos Cuellar and Stewart Downing from the firing line for this game but it was too little, too late. On Saturday, as Terry pinpointed, it all caught up with them.

The manager was left “devastated” by Villa’s collapse over the final half hour at Stamford Bridge but it was running power, not will power, which deserted his players to such damaging effect.

An uncomfortable follow-up question for the manager is whether or not this represents full value for money for the £138million owner Randy Lerner has put into the club since he took over. With a League Cup final and FA Cup semi-final in this season’s locker, as well as another challenge for the fabled top four finish, O’Neill can point to some undoubted advances.

But that is again being diluted by the frustration of seeing the campaign go up in flames because of burn out.

It is certainly difficult, as the boss seemed to come close to admitting after this game, to imagine their challenge for fourth place has any remaining credibility. It is now more of a concern that they hold off Everton and, dare I say it, Birmingham City in the jostling for final standings.

There again many Villa fans would have taken this hammering if in return they were offered an FA Cup final place at the expense of Saturday’s tormentors, but the prospect of Chelsea being deprived a semi-final victory by a team they have scarred so deeply is remote.

O’Neill has a famed reputation for finding the little triggers inside the heads of his players to inspire extraordinary performances but those powers are going to be put to the test like never before after such a horrendous experience.

So how did it happen? Pretty much as Terry called it. Agbonlahor was brought back and deployed wide right in a five-man midfield aimed at restraining Chelsea and it was not without early success.

Indeed – believe it or not – it was something of a surprise when Chelsea broke through in the 15th minute and it needed a slight but significant deflection off a Florent Malouda cross-cum-shot to give the excellent Lampard the chance to score at the far post.

But the 29th minute Villa equaliser, featuring a magnificent cross-field pass by Steve Sidwell and another penetrating Young cross from which John Carew could not miss, gave a brief but misleading picture of parity.

Chelsea regained the lead just before the interval with a Lampard penalty following a weary challenge on Yuri Zhirkov by James Collins, which encouraged O’Neill to thin his midfield blanket and move Agbonlahor alongside Carew after the break.

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. A wonderful team goal ended by Malouda put Chelsea out of reach on 57 minutes and the carnival began, as Villa found themselves powerless to check a level of purposeful, passing football which they cannot yet reproduce.

Carew and Agbonlahor departed to injuries and kept their heads down in the shelter as their team-mates were destroyed – another Lampard penalty forced once more by Zhirkov and beautifully constructed goals for Malouda and substitute Salomon Kalou before Lampard completed the rout with his 150th Chelsea goal.

It left observers wondering whether English football has ever known a more prolific midfielder. For Villa the questions were a little more earthy.