"The one thing with young players is they can bounce back quickly from setbacks," he told the Evening Gazette.
"I've told them to take on board the lessons, but the way we respond is to get out on to the training ground and work extremely hard to be prepared for Blackburn. We have to put things right in that match.
"The manner of the Chelsea defeat showed us as a group that, whatever we may think, we are very, very young and we aren't at a level to compete with a side like that, especially with the people we had missing.
"We can talk about should we have picked a different system, should we have picked different personnel - although we didn't have a lot of options - but the fact is that Chelsea are in a different league to us at the moment.