Chelsea's best play to their best in the best 30 minutes of Chelsea football all season

It's probably a good thing that Chelsea shut it down in the second half.  I'm not sure the player ratings could've handled a 90-minute performance at the levels shown in the first 30 minutes or so of the first half (before the red card).  You can't go higher than 10!  You can't play loose and fast with universal rules like that!

Chelsea put up ridiculous team stats (75% possesion, 92% pass completion, 15 corners, 21 shots to 5, 8 shots on target to 1, etc.) and several ridiculous individual counts as well (e.g.: Fabregas 172 touches) anyway.  On another day, without a career-best performance from WBA goalkeeper Ben Foster, this would've been a tennis score just in the first half already.

As far as Hazard, individually, when the match was still in the balance, he was at his best and Albion didn't have much of an answer for him.  His 4th tally in the Premier League and 6th overall on the season is good for second best on the team.  With his 5th Man of the Match win, he jumps one ahead of Oscar for most on the team.

Speaking of Oscar, he's once again in the top three where he's been a regular presence for much of the season.  Before the match, Mourinho had talked about ensuring that the young man doesn't suffer another burnout, but with the 23-year-old in such good form for both club and country, going about doing that may be a bit more complicated than we'd presume.

This was Oscar's 12th consecutive Chelsea appearance.  Eleven of those were starts, including a back-to-back against Manchester United (Sunday) and Shrewsbury Town (Tuesday).  But when he's been rated above the team average in 11 of those 12 games (United away the exception), and he's the third highest-rated player for the season, dropping him may not really be an option.  As we saw in the first half, Chelsea are starting to truly click and such synergy is much harder to achieve with constant rotation.

I guess this is why Mourinho's being paid the big bucks.

According to the community player ratings, the three highest-rated players for the season so far are Diego Costa (7.9), Eden Hazard (7.8), and Oscar (7.7).  While not in that exact order, here they all are.  When Chelsea play the best first half of the season, this is probably not a coincidence.

Eleven goals in ten games.  It's going to be really weird if he ever ends up in a goal-scoring slump.