16 min Early days but Fulham do have some good attacking options on the bench, including Kevin and Rodrigo Muniz.

13 min “Third personing two minutes into the new MBM season?” sniffs Tim Woods. “Either you’ve just been reading Kevin Pietersen’s autobiography or the game has well and truly upped and left. (Although Tim Woods always enjoys the ‘taken as far as he can’ gag.)”

If I ever talk about myself in the third person without a jauntily raised eyebrow, you have permission to boot me straight in the teeth.

11 min A brilliant lobbed pass from Palmer releases Joao Pedro on the left side of the area. He tries to cut back inside and is excellently challenged by Bassey.

Moments later, Lavia sends Bassey into outer space and is booked. He did get a bit of the ball but the manner in which he wiped Bassey out invalidated that.

10 min Hato whacks a weird pass straight at his teammate Colwill in the Chelsea area. A game of pinball ensues before Fulham win a corner. It’s swung in and claimed by Sanchez.

8 min Chelsea look really good, particularly the front three of Palmer, Rogers and Joao Pedro.

Palmer dances round the houses and lifts a right-foot shot that is patted down by Leno.

7 min In other news, it took Cole Palmer 30 seconds of the 2026-27 season to equal his total of Premier League assists in 2025-26. The most peculiar of statgasms.

5 min Colwill lets the ball run under his feet, then compounds the error by wiping out Bobb and is booked.

4 min A neat short corner eventually leads to a stinging half-volley from James that is blocked. Chelsea are rampant.

4 min Rogers runs at a frazzled Fulham defence and yeehas a shot that deflects behind for a corner.

2 min Has Alvaro Arbeloa taken Fulham as far as he can?

Has Rob Smyth taken this gag as far as he can?

Joao Pedro, Chelsea’s new No9, has scored after 30 seconds. Cuenca’s driven ball out of defence was headed whence it came by one of the Chelsea centre-backs. Palmer slipped a simple* first-time pass through to Joao Pedro, who dinked the ball decisively over Leno.

* For him.

1 min Chelsea kick off from right to left as we watch.

Who’s ready for some hardcore Premier League football? It’s that or Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased).

Four of the big summer signings start tonight: Gonzalo Garcia and Cesar Palacios for Fulham, Morgan Rogers and Maxence Lacroix for Chelsea.

After a season of struggle and regression, with two head coaches and two spells under a caretaker, there is cautious optimism that this campaign will bring something like stability. Much of that optimism centres around the appointment of Xabi Alonso, an elite manager with something to prove. There is also an expectation that the young players brought in as part of BlueCo’s £1.8bn splurge in recent years are beginning to come into their best years. There is no European football to complicate the schedule and a return to the Champions League by finishing in the top four or five would suffice for now. More importance will be placed on the domestic cups after a season without trophies.

Alonso’s squad is more rounded than what Enzo Maresca or Liam Rosenior had at their disposal. Maxence Lacroix and Morgan Rogers bring quality to positions where Chelsea were lacking it – at centre-back and out wide. Danny Welbeck and Jordan Henderson – the “uncs” as Tosin Adarabioyo has called them – will contribute as much off the pitch as on it. The signing of Marco Palestra, a specialist wing-back, suggests Alonso wants to be tactically flexible. He has used a back four and a back three in pre-season.

Marco Silva cutting the cord after five years by the river came as little surprise. If his time at Craven Cottage was successful in re-establishing Fulham as a Premier League club, he rarely concealed his ambitions to manage in European competition. He was frequently explicit in his disappointment that the club’s ownership did not meet him halfway by funding a stronger squad. Silva’s powers of rebadging and replenishing talent will be missed now that he has decamped to Benfica. Under him, Fulham played entertaining football, a collection of ugly ducklings showing their renewed worth for a club that, despite falling short of European qualification, looked upwards rather than downwards at the relegation battle. They were often a pleasure to watch, and ornery opposition for all-comers.

Álvaro Arbeloa is a very different type of appointment, with far less experience than his predecessor in frontline coaching terms, even if he arrives with Real Madrid on his CV. His arrival, though, has opened up a working relationship with the Spanish aristos, Gonzalo García and César Palacios arriving to work with a coach who helped them through the ranks in Madrid. By little coincidence, all three share the same agency as their representatives. There have been links with Endrick and Thiago Pitarch, two further young Real jewels, leading to a sense of Fulham becoming some form of Madrileño nursery, a Santiago Bernabéu on Thames. Should that play out, it would represent another sea change.

It is a necessary reset. Although it would be pushing it to say that Chelsea have switched from development centre to retirement home, even after the signings of Jordan Henderson and Danny Welbeck, there has been a clear shift in strategy this summer. Some grownups are in the room at last and, for Xabi Alonso, the hope is that bringing in more experience will help a squad still packed with youngsters show more composure when adversity strikes.

Discipline was a problem for Chelsea last season: they had 11 red cards in all competitions and a lot of the wounds were self-inflicted. Chelsea were impetuous, on the receiving end of too many bookings for dissent and prone to collapsing at the first sign of trouble. No wonder Alonso, who was the epitome of calm during his playing career, has focused on maintaining “emotional control” before opening his tenure as manager with Monday’s trip to Fulham.

It will be a test of Chelsea’s mentality. Craven Cottage has been the setting for some spectacular implosions during the BlueCo era, the path to two 2-1 victories for Fulham over their neighbours smoothed by João Félix earning a red card on his Chelsea debut in 2023 and by Marc Cucurella getting himself sent off after 22 minutes last season.