Chelsea made a dream begin to the sport and to the season, urgent excessive on Fulham’s first possession, forcing a turnover, and Cole Palmer discovering Joao Pedro to complete with aplomb, 1-v-1 with the goalkeeper. There have been 31 seconds on the clock: the quickest purpose in our Premier League historical past, the quickest first purpose for any staff to start the season.
Emboldened, we saved up the stress and the depth, creating a number of harmful conditions, however not fairly discovering the fitting closing contact or closing go. James did see a piledriver blocked whereas Palmer and Morgan Rogers each appeared to go up presentable taking pictures alternatives.
Fulham ultimately acquired over the shock of the primary purpose and began exerting some stress of their very own. Younger Josh King was notably threatening, and after inflicting some concern together with his first pushed effort, he would beat Robert Sánchez on 23 minutes … with a shot you’d count on your goalkeeper to avoid wasting each time.
Emboldened by their bit of excellent fortune, Fulham pressed for a fast second. One way or the other we survived, regardless of some somewhat chaotic defending and emergency clearances.
Latest vintages of Chelsea could have merely collapsed from there, however impressively, we recovered our form and confidence, and began dominating proceedings. This strong 10-minute spell led to a second purpose, due to some nice work from Maxence Lacroix, who was an attacking menace to arrange fellow new signing Morgan Rogers for his first Chelsea purpose.
Chelsea made a superb begin to the second half as nicely, and after Palmer let an incredible likelihood go him by, he made no mistake from a good angle to offer us a two-goal lead within the forty ninth minute.
The house facet sadly weren’t keen to surrender, and a few extra questionable goalkeeping gifted them one more purpose barely 5 minutes later. Fulham adopted that up with one other massive spell of stress, which we had been ready to withstand.
Each groups began making adjustments as we headed into the ultimate 20 minutes, with the end result very a lot feeling prefer it was hanging within the stability. The adjustments appeared to assist Fulham greater than us, and although they gave it a great go, we might cling on to all three factors. (JP did have the ball at the back of the online late on for our fourth, however it was dominated out for an offside.)
