Chelsea 2 Fulham 0: Two VAR controversies benefit Maresca’s side, impact of Delap injury

Chelsea beat Fulham 2-0 in the Premier League after two controversial VAR decisions edged the match in their favour.

In the first half, Marco Silva’s side had a Josh King goal disallowed for a foul by Rodrigo Muniz in the build-up. Joao Pedro then compounded the pain by scoring from a header just before half-time.

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Ten minutes into the second period, Enzo Fernandez doubled Chelsea’s lead from the penalty spot after Ryan Sessegnon was adjudged to have handled the ball in the area, despite the ball seemingly hitting Joao Pedro’s hand seconds before.

The win puts Chelsea top of the table, with seven points from three games, ahead of the rest of the afternoon’s matches.

Chelsea benefit from VAR interventions… again

Despite many football supporters making it clear they are not big fans of VAR, Chelsea’s following who have attended matches at Stamford Bridge will have few complaints so far this season.

Firstly, for the second straight home game, Chelsea avoided falling behind in the first half after the VAR intervened and told the match official to go to the monitor.

Fulham celebrated wildly when King broke away to score, only for their jubilation to be cut short. VAR Michael Salisbury sent referee Robert Jones to the monitor after spotting Rodrigo Muniz tread on Trevoh Chalobah’s foot in the build-up. Premier League rules dictate that VAR will intervene in the case of a clear and obvious error.

Josh King’s opening goal is disallowed for a ‘careless challenge’ after VAR review ❌ 📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/5pLOwOcPc2 — Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) August 30, 2025

Jones disallowed the goal. The official explanation from the Premier League Match centre — and Jones on the pitch, when he spoke to the crowd — was that Muniz was guilty of ‘a careless challenge’. Fulham head coach Marco Silva and the away fans were incensed. You can understand why. It looked a rather unfortunate case of Chalobah placing his foot near Muniz while he was in possession and spinning away.

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It made you think of Chelsea’s opening fixture against Crystal Palace. Eberechi Eze had his free-kick goal ruled out because Marc Guehi was adjudged to be standing too close to the wall when the set piece was taken. It was the kind of incident you see most weeks, one that rarely gets punished.

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Chelsea were able to double their lead when Salisbury and Jones combined to intervene again. Chalobah was involved once more, his cross striking the arm of Ryan Sessegnon in the area. This came despite the ball also seemingly hitting the arm of Joao Pedro in the box just before.

#CHEFUL – 22’ VAR OVERTURN After VAR review, the referee overturned the original decision of goal to Fulham. Referee announcement: “After review, Fulham number nine commits a careless challenge, stands on the foot of the Chelsea defender, therefore we disallow the goal and we… — Premier League Match Centre (@PLMatchCentre) August 30, 2025

A penalty was awarded, which Fernandez put away and a Chelsea side that had been very much second best were suddenly 2-0 up.

Chelsea will accept it but they cannot rely on the match officials every time they play at Stamford Bridge.

Delap injury hours after Jackson deal agreed

The decision to loan Nicolas Jackson to Bayern Munich could already be coming back to haunt Chelsea.

Just hours after it emerged the London club had agreed terms with the Bundesliga side, and given permission to fly to Germany for a medical, one of the players who has replaced him in the pecking order — Liam Delap — picked up an injury.

(Photo: Crystal Pix/MB Media/Getty Images)

The 22-year-old pulled up with what looked like a hamstring strain after chasing a ball over the top by Marc Cucurella.

Delap, signed from Ipswich Town for £30m ($40.5m) in June, instantly signalled to the bench that he had to come off. After a brief exchange with head coach Maresca, he headed straight down the tunnel for treatment.

Such an injury usually means few weeks on the sidelines. An international break over the next fortnight will eat into some of his recovery time but he surely has to be a doubt for the start of Chelsea’s Champions League campaign on August 17 against… Bayern Munich of all teams.

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Hindsight is a wonderful thing but there was always a question mark over what options Chelsea would be left with if one of Joao Pedro (the other striker signing this window) or Delap suffered a problem.

In fairness, Jackson was pushing for a move but perhaps partly because he no longer felt part of the plans.

Another possible candidate to fill in for Delap — Christopher Nkunku — completed his move to AC Milan earlier today.

All this brought back memories of the end of the January transfer window when Marc Guiu and Jackson went off with injury within two hours of the deadline closing. Delap’s issue has at least happened two days before the summer window comes to an end, leaving the door open for Chelsea to do something about it if they wish.

And at least Chelsea can still count on Joao Pedro’s remarkable start to his Chelsea career. His header just before the interval took his tally to five goals in six appearances.

JOAO PEDRO SCORES AGAIN! 💥 The Brazilian’s header puts Chelsea in front ⚽ 📺 @tntsports & @discoveryplusUK pic.twitter.com/B8Cee4ZHxi — Football on TNT Sports (@footballontnt) August 30, 2025

Set pieces starting to pay off

It has taken a while for Chelsea’s set-piece coach Bernardo Cueva to start doing a good impression of Arsenal counterpart Nicolas Jover.

Cueva was lured away from Brentford for £750,000 in March 2024 in the hope he could make Chelsea just as dangerous from dead-ball situations as Jover has made the Gunners.

To the naked eye, Chelsea rarely looked threatening at the craft in his first full season, although Opta show they did score on 12 occasions in the Premier League. And they have begun the 2025-26 campaign in impressive fashion, already managing a third of last season’s total.

There was a hat-trick of set-piece goals in the 5-1 win at West Ham eight days ago and Joao Pedro put Chelsea in front against Fulham with a fine header from Enzo Fernandez’s corner.

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One of the things that has been really noticeable is that the delivery has been a lot better from players such as Pedro Neto and Fernandez. They either target the near post for a flick-on, or land the ball around the middle of the goal between six and eight yards out.

An example of the latter came before Joao Pedro opened the scoring with another Fernandez cross coming close to being headed in by Tosin Adarabioyo.

If Chelsea can continue scoring on a regular basis like this, it will really help their bid to challenge on all fronts and take some of the pressure off them to create chances from open play.

What did Maresca say?

On whether Delap’s injury means they must go back into the transfer market: “Liam’s injury doesn’t look good in terms of it was a full speed hamstring so that requires like always weeks. And in terms of (signing) another striker, I have just finished the game, I came here from the changing room to the press conference and now, after we finish, we will see if we take any decision.

Enough striker options? “When you have two strikers it is enough, when one of them is injured for weeks, it is not enough. Today we played for more than one hour with Tyrique (George) and he did brilliant. The last time he played as a No.9 was against Manchester United last year. We tried to use different solutions. If you remember there were some games where we used Pedro (Neto) as a No.9. But for sure when you have two proper No 9s it is enough.”

What did Silva say?

When asked how he feels afterwards, Silva told TNT Sports: “For someone that loves football as a manager, former football player, as a fan sometimes, when I can just watch a game, I feel sad, really. Just sad.

On the display by his team, he added: “Performance-wise, outstanding first half. All the decisions from the VAR, all the decisions from the referee made a massive impact in the game. And second half was not at the level I would like to see our team.

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“I told them (his players) we cannot control all the decisions that were against us. How you disallow a goal like that one is unbelievable. We have meetings, all the meetings with the referees, people that are in charge that we all respect. We go for a meeting, all of us want to win. Of course, when it is against us we feel more when probably Enzo this afternoon is not feeling the same as myself but we go there to try to see a direction in things.

“One of the main things: VAR is not here to referee the games. It is to see things, the protocols, see things clear. For us, and for all the world, just for the person that was there. It was not something unbelievable to disallow that goal. For me, it was unbelievable really. And of course after this…. we can talk about many things but I prefer to say nothing more because I will be punished and I want to be on the bench in the next game and I don’t want to pay fines. I want to help our players, it has been difficult for us at the start of the season.”

What next for Chelsea?

Saturday, September 13: Brentford (Away), Premier League, 8pm UK, 3pm ET.

(Top photo by JUSTIN TALLIS/AFP via Getty Images)

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