WITH Jose Mourinho threatening to indulge in a spot of squad rotation, Mick McCarthy has promised Chelsea will be the only side fielding a weakened team at Stamford Bridge this afternoon.

While Bryan Robson opted to rest five of his first-teamers as West Brom crashed to a 4-0 defeat at the home of the champions last month, McCarthy will send out his strongest line-up in an attempt to kick-start Sunderland's stuttering season.

The Black Cats might be the biggest outsiders in Premiership history when they kick off in West London, but they will not be throwing in the towel before a ball has even been kicked.

"I will be playing as strong a team as I can and trying to win the game," said McCarthy, who is still to pick up a point as a Premiership manager despite presiding over 13 matches.

"I joked about leaving players out at the start of the season, but I won't be doing it.

"Bryan had his own reasons for that - he thought it was the right thing to do - but, if I did it, imagine what would happen if we went down there and got a slapping. It could happen.

"We will have travelling supporters down there and they won't want us to write the game off.

"If we get something from this they will have a lot to cheer about. It will be a famous point or a famous victory.

"Even if it's just the level of performance, they will still feel better coming home than they would if we went down there and got murdered. I'm not going to rest anyone."

Perhaps it is just as well. The disparity between the two sides is already colossal without McCarthy attempting to make it worse.

The Black Cats boss does not like the legion of statistics than can be trotted out to underline Sunderland's perilous hold on their Premiership tenure but, when it comes to Chelsea, it is a lack of pound notes rather than points that is most telling.

True, the two clubs currently hold the Premiership's only 100 per cent records (Chelsea are yet to drop a point, Sunderland are yet to win one), but the financial gulf between them is even more vast.

Chelsea's squad is valued at £136m while Sunderland's, despite McCarthy's addition of 12 new faces during the summer, is worth a twentieth of that figure.

"I think someone's added a few quid onto ours to come up with that," joked the former Republic of Ireland boss.

"But there's no point in doing the sums, it's just a totting up process.

"It's an interesting exercise to see where we stand but, last year, there would have been teams who did it to us and added up what our squad cost. It doesn't matter - it's about the two teams that play on the day.

"I would hate to go down there, sit back, soak up pressure, lose and come away without having had a shot at the goal. That would really go against the grain with me.

"We will get forward, we will try to play it and we will try to score a goal. We have to play like that. There's no point going down there and inviting Chelsea's players to come at us for 90 minutes because they will pick a hole in us at some point."

It is much harder to envisage Sunderland's strikers picking a hole in a Chelsea defence that is yet to concede a league goal this season.

Jon Stead's recent strike for England Under-21s should have bolstered his fragile confidence, while Julio Arca was in the Black Cats side that won 4-2 at Stamford Bridge back in March 2001.

Beyond that, though, it is difficult to find too many crumbs of comfort other than the 'Northern Ireland factor'.

The international minnows highlighted football's enduring ability to surprise on Wednesday night and, as Wigan proved on the first day of the season, Chelsea are not immune to the odd wobble.

"Someone will score against them, someone will beat them and someone will get something at Stamford Bridge," claimed McCarthy. "They are not going to win every game this season.

"Why can't it be us? There's no point in me waxing lyrical about them - we all know their players and the two teams they could pick from their squad.

"But it can happen. If you have that belief, that desire on the day, who knows? We might need a huge slice of luck to achieve that, but I don't think we have had too much of that so far."

McCarthy is likely to hand debuts to his two most recent recruits this afternoon. Arsenal loanee Justin Hoyte is set to replace Nyron Nosworthy at right-back, while Frenchman Christian Bassila will be handed the unenviable task of man-marking Frank Lampard at the base of midfield.