Last season, Chelsea finished third in the Premier League, in what was a very difficult second half of the season.

Manchester City won the league with 93 points, while Liverpool were just a point behind.

Chelsea finished the season in third place – 23 points behind Man City, after a fine start to the campaign.

Chelsea were top of the league until December when the team started to crack due to injuries.

By the second-half of the season, Chelsea’s title ambitions had collapsed, before the crisis involving former owner Roman Abramovich came up.

Ben Chilwell is however optimistic ahead of next season, and he’s backing Chelsea to close the gap on Liverpool and Manchester City.

“City and Liverpool have set the bar, for maybe the last five years, which every other team in the league is aspiring to get at,” Ben Chilwell told football.london.

“Being a Chelsea player, I’d say we’re the closest to them, and we’re aspiring to get on the same level as them.

“We showed in patches last season that we could compete with them, but it’s that consistency that they’ve shown — they’re not just one-season wonders. They’ve done it season-in, season-out for the last five years.

“That’s where we’re trying to get to. We’ve had conversations in the dressing room, as players and with the staff, that consistency is the thing that we now need to [achieve]. We’ve got the talent in the team; we showed that in the Champions League two years ago.

“We showed it in the first half of the season last year too. We were top, we beat Juventus 4-0 in the Champions League.

“So we’ve shown we’ve got the talent in the team. We just need to now have that consistency that Liverpool and City have got.”