Fulham’s Year End – A Vertiginous Tale

Something extraordinary happened in Fulham in the last week of 2024. For the first time since 1979, Fulham FC beat Chelsea FC at the latter’s ground. It ended 45 years of irritation, putting up with the jibes and taunts from that aggressive club squatting just within the old Borough of Fulham’s boundary, its mammoth Stamford Bridge stadium a monument to property developers and Russian oligarch money.

That has been the story this century, but things were much more even in the 1970s. A school friend and massive Chelsea supporter took me to my first experience of live football at some point in late 1971. I can’t remember who they were playing. All I remember is standing in the old Shed and being completely terrified – not least by the barrage of thuggish abuse all around me and the open distribution of neo-fascist leaflets. I was not the instant convert he had hoped for (he was made of sterner stuff, going on to become a distinguished foreign correspondent in several – other – war zones). The terror didn’t last, though it did turn me off extremist politics forever, and I had caught the football bug. At university, I lived just across Alexandra Park from Manchester City’s old ground at Maine Road. I often stood at the back of the stand there too and, while nobody ever bothered me, there was often blood on the surrounding pavements afterwards.

Then in 1978, I moved to Fulham and explored Craven Cottage for the first time. I loved it immediately: passionate but friendly, a big club in a small ground with the river as its backdrop and Concorde, with its distinctive rich bass roar, flying over just beyond the Putney End late in the match. Most astonishing was to watch a trio of the greatest footballers playing with a nonchalant freedom that still bamboozled visiting defenders: Bobby Moore, Alan Mullery and George Best. They were legends for many reasons. I had seen George Best drive by as I walked along my street in Manchester. Three years later, when I saw him at Craven Cottage, he seemed to glide past opponents as if he was just flicking the steering wheel of his sports car.

It seems, sadly for this story, they were not playing the day in 1979 when Fulham defeated Chelsea. By then I had begun to understand the enmity properly: not just about Chelsea being a nearby rival, but the meaning behind the inaccurate chant in the Cottage of, ‘there’s only one team in Fulham’. It is not just about the very different culture. Chelsea’s ground sits bordered by a railway line, Brompton Cemetery and underneath them the course of Counter’s Creek (more money connections), across which the bridge was built, replacing the Stamford (an elision of Stoney, or possibly Sandy Ford). It is that tiny river, flowing from Kensal Green to the Thames, that forms the true boundary between two medieval villages. The Chelsea football club sits on the Fulham side of the river and has the nerve to be camped right opposite Fulham Town Hall, until this century still in operation as the borough’s centre. I knew it well because I often sang in a choir in its superb, if a little dishevelled, main hall, where my old music teacher was the conductor of the Fulham Symphony Orchestra. I had just begun my subsequent career as a classical music journalist (the role I hold now for EyeOnLondon) and radio presenter. Crossing the road to a rehearsal could be fraught.

All these years later, both grounds are very different, and Fulham Town Hall’s doors are firmly closed. The Riverside Stand juts out over the river, obscuring the view of the rowing, and offers the sort of corporate junkets the Premiership (unlike the old First Division) demands. And finally, Fulham began to haul back the deficit against the other team in the last week of 2024. Perhaps Fulham supporters should follow the lead of the Houses of Parliament, which never refer to each other as the Lords and Commons but only ‘the other place’.

Fulham finished the year in eighth place, but it was almost so much better. At one moment on the final Sunday, Fulham were trouncing Bournemouth and they were swapping places, moving Fulham up to sixth. Just above them, Manchester City were having a tough time against Leicester. Had they lost and Fulham punched home a couple more goals, Fulham would have slotted into fifth and a likely Champions League place. It was all too much and vertigo took hold. The inevitable horribly late goal saved Bournemouth and Fulham sank back into the river mud – back to eighth: death by a thousand draws. Still, eighth is the best since the days of that great polylinguist, Roy Hodgson, who nearly won us the Europa Cup and had Eastern European supporters trudging through the grounds of Fulham Palace to the most civilised and ancient ground in London.

For more information about Fulham FC’s history and its iconic Craven Cottage stadium, visit the official Fulham FC history page.

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