Chelsea today begin their Carabao Cup campaign at home to League Two side Barrow this evening. Enzo Maresca’s squad have been in decent form since their defeat at Manchester City on the opening weekend of the season and are strong favourites to reach the fourth-round. Such is their strength in depth, any team the Blues boss fields will be expected to win at Stamford Bridge.

Cup success would be a welcome achievement for the Blues this season, with the club still chasing their first piece of silverware since the change of ownership in 2022. Having reached the final last year, Chelsea’s co-owners will no doubt be keen to go one further this time around.

They will be heavy favourites to beat Barrow, though the Bluebirds are in good form themselves. Sitting top of League Two, they have tasted defeat only once thus far and arrive with confidence as a result. Follow all the action LIVE with Standard Sport’s dedicated match blog!

Chelsea vs Barrow latest news

Live updates

47 mins: GOAL!

Nkunku finds Mudryk, who rolls it to Pedro Neto for a tap in!

Back underway!

Ben Chilwell comes on for his first appearance of the season!

After that bright Barrow start, it's been a stroll ever since Nkunku's opener. The League Two side have kept their discipline, trying to narrow spaces but will surely tire. There are plenty more goals here for Chelsea.

Blues in cruise control at the break.

44 mins: Felix in the book for kicking the ball away...

40 mins: Something of a lull now, feels as if Chelsea can change gear anytime they want.

32 mins: Appears the goal has in fact been awarded an own goal from Barrow ‘keeper Paul Farman.

Harsh, that.

28 mins: GOAL!

A lovely free-kick from Felix kisses the post, hits the ‘keeper and nettles into the net.

25 mins: Mudryk drives to the byline and fires in a tempting cross but Barrow clear their lines.

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Carabao Cup third round

For a second, I thought we might be able to add a brand new name to the list of teams Chelsea have played against in our history, currently standing right around 200 (202 by one count). Alas, we already played Barrow AFC once, and exactly once before, way back in 1948, in the third round of the FA Cup. Chelsea won 5-0, in front of 44,336 spectators at Stamford Bridge — still the largest crowd to ever witness a Barrow AFC match. (And that won’t change since the capacity of the Bridge is slightly smaller now due to TV camera positions and safety and accessibility features and the like.)

A similar scoreline is certainly not out of the question this time around either, should the match play out as one might expect. Of course, strange things can and sometimes do happen in cup ties. We only have to remember third-division Bradford AFC coming from two goals down to beat José Mourinho’s title-winning Chelsea in 2015, 4-2, at the Bridge.

Barrow are one division lower than Bradford, but they are leading that division, which puts them on the level of a Wrexham, with whom we drew 2-2 in preseason earlier this summer.

So basically, you have take this seriously, especially on the pitch.

Date / Time: Tuesday, September 24, 2024, 19.45 BST; 2:45pm EDT; 12:15am IST (next day)Venue: Stamford Bridge, SW6Referee: Oliver Langford (on pitch) — no VAR in this round of the competitionForecast: Comfortably mild

On TV: Sky Sports+ (UK); none (USA); none (India); Startimes Sports Arena (NGA); elsewhereStreaming: Sky Go (UK); Paramount+ (USA); FanCode (India); StarTimes

Chelsea team news: Beyond just taking things seriously, this match should provide a great chance to rest and rotate, but also impress, and maybe even give some minutes to a few youngsters (though there is an EFL Trophy match at the same time as well, also against fourth division opposition in Bromley FC).

Malo Gusto has been cleared for action, though I would hope he’s highly unlikely to even see the pitch in this one, let alone get out on it. Reece James and Roméo Lavia remain out, with the latter getting very close as well.

Enzo Maresca has already confirmed that Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall will start and that the likes of Josh Acheampong and Tyrique George will be in the squad. More surprisingly, he’s also set to include Carney Chukwuemeka and Ben Chilwell, with the latter’s reappearance from the deep dungeons of Cobham an especially welcome (and maybe even surprising, to an extent) development.

Barrow AFC team news: The Bluebirds were founded four years before Chelsea, in 1901, but have never played higher than the third tier in the pyramid, spending much of the past half century in non-league football. They punched their ticket back into the Football League in 2020, winning the National League on a points-per-game basis after the season was suspended due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

They currently lead the fourth division, as mentioned at the top, winning five of seven and losing just once in the league so far. They also beat Championship side Derby County on penalties in the previous round of this competition. Forward Gerard Garner and defender Theo Vassell, a Stoke City Academy product, lead the team in goals with three each. The manager is former Spurs and Birmingham City midfielder Stephen Clemence.

Previously: Our previous match in this competition was last year’s final, which we lost in extra-time to Liverpool. So that’s still annoying. Thankfully the 3-0 win over the weekend was the opposite of annoying.

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Stephen Clemence’s side are excited to visit Stamford Bridge in the Carabao Cup third-round clash

Dean Campbell’s calling card is knocking a Premier League heavyweight out of a cup competition. So when Barrow’s holding midfielder lines up at Stamford Bridge for a Carabao Cup tie with Chelsea on Tuesday, the 23-year-old can draw on this for inspiration.

In January 2023, on FA Cup third round weekend, Campbell, a 63rd-minute substitute for Stevenage, drove home a 90th-minute winner against Aston Villa that sent the travelling fans ballistic and gave the boy from Aberdeen an entry in the trophy’s folklore.

“An amazing day for me, one that I’ll remember forever so I am hoping to make a few more memories this season as well,” Campbell says. “It was an amazing atmosphere – I’d never been to Villa Park before and it was an incredible stadium and Villa had a lot of fans there. The atmosphere was brilliant. We managed to take a lot of Stevenage fans too, which added to the occasion even more.

“It’s an amazing experience to play at these stadiums that you don’t get to often. You have to cherish every moment, enjoy every opportunity. So we have to go [to Stamford Bridge] and work as hard as we can.”

As League Two leaders after a 2-0 victory against Newport on Saturday, Stephen Clemence’s side will arrive in a confident mood. They need to be as they try to shock an Enzo Maresca squad that features the elite talent of Cole Palmer, Enzo Fernández, Moisés Caicedo and many more, with the team sat three points behind the Premier League leaders, Manchester City.

Campbell says: “Those players are worth hundreds of millions. So to get the opportunity to play against players like that is amazing. It will be brilliant to see where I am in terms of the level required to play at the highest level. So it’s an exciting time for all of us. We’re all just looking to cherish the occasion, but we’re also looking to go and make ourselves proud and represent the club.”

Owing to Barrow-in-Furness’s remote location on the Cumbrian west coast, the club has, since the early 2000s, adopted a hybrid system in which the players are clustered in and around Manchester, training at FC United of Manchester’s Broadhurst Park in Moston during the week and making the 100-mile, two-hour-plus trip north for home games.

Clemence says: “We travel to a hotel in Barrow and stay there. Because we don’t spend a lot of time in the area, we always send some players on a Friday afternoon to go around the schools and do a bit of work in the community. We’ll also have a little walk around the town on a Saturday morning, have a coffee and see a few supporters there. Then we play and it’s back to training in Manchester.

“What this does, it gives you a better chance of getting the better players or a bigger pool to choose from when it comes to recruitment because, what you find in League Two, you tend to have to sign players that live near a training ground because they’re not paid the money that the Premier League boys are who can just move house.”

Clemence took over in May having been sacked by Gillingham less than six months into his first managerial post. The 46-year-old usually lines Barrow up in a 4-3-3. “I like my team to try to get after the opponent and like to think we’re a high-pressing team,” he says.

“I want to play our football in the opponent’s half and try to get bums off seats, entertain the supporters. We’re an entertainment industry and I want to try to find the best route towards goal for us to create chances and score.”

Clemence understands the challenge of Chelsea. “It’s going be a very tough game,” he says. “I was sitting at home watching Barnsley try to take on Manchester United at Old Trafford and they got a bit of a doing [7-0 in the Carabao Cup] and Barnsley are doing quite well in League One – the division above us.

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“So we know it’s going be a very tough game. But what I’ll say going into it is: I’m really proud of us for getting to this stage. It’s a great moment for everybody in the town to be going to Chelsea. A big moment for us all.”

Campbell, who remains Aberdeen’s youngest debutant at 16 years, one month and 23 days, has felt the rush of a big moment, the strike at Villa deriving from cute thinking.

Campbell says: “I knew that they were down to 10 men [Leander Dendoncker had been sent off] so had most of their players in the box and I thought I’d go out for a short corner.

“I got the ball, looked up and saw I had more space than I thought I would. I focused on making a good connection and giving the keeper something to deal with and thankfully I hit it really well.

“Moments like that are what you dream of – to play on the biggest stages and have a feeling like that and get to celebrate in front of all the fans that pay their hard-earned money to come and watch us.

“So it wasn’t just a goal for me, it was a goal for the whole club. It’s something I’d like to feel again and hopefully we all can.”