Another week passes, another examination passed and another competition in which to progress. Columnist Giles Smith dives in.

We learn more about this current Chelsea side with each game that passes. On Sunday, at Blackburn, we learned that it can play underwater.

I defy anyone not to be impressed by that. It's hard enough to travel to somewhere like Ewood Park, dismantle the home side and comprehensively win. But it's even tougher to do it while wearing snorkels. That's the kind of achievement that sends a message right across Europe. Possibly even further.

Have we ever seen rain like it? I seem to remember a midweek game at Selhurst Park back in the early 1990s - rain drops the size of Baked Bean tins, pitch the colour of cold Hot Chocolate, the ball sticking in the mud. At least, I think it was the ball. It might have been Gareth Hall - it was a while ago now.

Anyway, that night at Crystal Palace was just a quick shower by comparison with what fell on Blackburn at the weekend, which was essentially the annual rainfall of Indonesia, only compressed into a single, 40-minute period.

To say there was a little 'water on the surface' during that first half was not to exaggerate. Stick a couple of tubes and a diving board in, and you would have had a perfectly acceptable aqua-themed amusement park for all the family.

How José Bosingwa and Wayne Bridge managed to get forward so often without so much as a single outboard motor between them, I don't think I'll ever fully understand.

Yet that was the brilliance of Chelsea's response to this potentially dire and definitely slippery situation. There was no adjusting the tactics to the conditions - no hoisting the ball long in the vague direction of the front three and hoping a lifeboat would turn up eventually.

Instead the players remained calm, kept mobile and stuck to the usual tried and trusted game plan: get the ball down on the water and play it to flippers.

Result: three more points and the run of consecutive away victories in the league extended to nine. (These days, when we're not blasting into orbit the record for consecutive home victories, we're taking a big crack at the record for away ones.)

Plus, of course, two more goals for the Premier League's leading scorer, Nicolas Anelka, albeit one of them a slightly pantomime affair, with Paul Robinson deciding to scream across at the linesman, rather than turn round and notice that the ball, which passed him a split-second earlier, had hit a puddle behind him and had slowed down to the point where he might have had a chance of clearing it, had he been able to swim hard enough.

Still, as they say, they all count. And maybe the really funny ones, like that one, ought to count double.

Anyway, overall, Sunday's efforts rather put into perspective Sir Alex Ferguson's latest inspired conspiracy theory - this time relating to unhelpful wear and tear produced by the fixture list. The Manchester United manager has noticed that, this season, his team is almost always obliged to travel away in the league directly after travelling away in the Champions League.

And there's no arguing with that statistically - although there is plenty of arguing with the daffy notion that this indicates the presence of a dark and malicious hand, rather than the luck of the draw.

But that's just one of the quirks that makes Fergie so loveable, isn't it? He thinks someone is out to get him when there is a hole in his Polo mint.

The extension of Ferguson's argument was that it was ruinously difficult for United to follow a Champions League match, away at Celtic (which they drew), with a Premier League match away at Arsenal (which they lost). Of course, playing Arsenal at the Emirates is tough, even these days, no matter where you have been beforehand.

Nevertheless, it seems United had declined the opportunity to train at Parkhead on the day before their match with Celtic (the courtesy traditionally extended ahead of Champions League matches), in favour of spending an extra night in Manchester.

So that quick shuttle between Manchester and Glasgow was hardly the most arduous of European away trips and it's unlikely that anyone will have been complaining of jet lag on the subsequent journey down to London.

Chelsea, on the other hand, had been to Rome in midweek - a proper trip requiring a two-hour flight, overnight hotels, unfamiliar food and everything - and then faced a journey to Blackburn which is famously, as everyone in the south knows, football's Timbuktu.

But instead of coming out and blaming malicious anti-Chelsea forces at large in the world, the players and staff got on with it, played football and won. And at Waterworld. Hugely satisfying.

With luck, we can take that satisfaction into tonight's clash with Burnley in the big one - the Carling. We never tire, in this column, of stressing the importance of England's second oldest knock-out cup competition, nor of underlining its emphatic and ennobling place in the recent history of our club.

Hence it delights us to note that, as other so-called 'top' clubs are preparing to field under-strength sides and are looking in the laundry room for the nearest eligible teenager who can fill a gap on the right side of midfield, we appear to be on the verge of welcoming back Didier Drogba and Joe Cole.

Under-strength? Here at Chelsea, we don't know the meaning of the term.