Football's coming home…

A dirty December afternoon on the banks of the Thames in Putney, and two thousand Fulham fans are back to watch their team. Hallelujah, football's coming home!

For many, our last trip to The Cottage was back in March, when mediocre form in the Championship certainly wasn't suggesting any quick return to the promised land of the Premiership.

But, the rest is history, back we bounced, and for the last two months Fulham have been clinging to the bottom rungs of the top division. And now Liverpool are in town.

In the Covid era, a pilgrimage to Craven Cottage is inevitably a rather different one. The much vaunted 'match experience' is a sequence of unfamiliar rituals.

That means no more pints in Putney pubs before kick-off (unless you're washing it down with a Scotch Egg).

Instead, Covid protocols require ticket ballots, health questionnaires, health & safety videos, designated arrival times, temperature checks on arrival.

All rounded off with a socially-distanced half-hour queue stretching much of the way back to Hammersmith to get

in the ground.

As the queue edges nearer the ground, anticipation heightens as we finally hear the familiar refrain of clacking turnstiles.

These aren't any old turnstiles, these are Grade II listed

turnstiles, unleashing a soundscape that still evokes the ghosts of Jonny Haynes, cloth caps and Craven A cigarettes.

Fortunately, two lockdowns have been kind to my body mass index, so I'm still able to wriggle through the narrow turnstile gap. It's good to be back.

I track down my seat, a large green circle on the backrest announcing its availability.

Distancing requirements mean three empty seats either side.

It's almost as good as getting on a Ryanair plane, and discovering you've got a whole row to yourself. As for feeling Covid secure, sure, we're all masked up.

And when the bloke behind starts coughing, try and

remember that the infection rate in Hammersmith & Fulham is still only about one in four hundred.

Gazing in the direction of the floodlit pitch, along the right touchline, the skeleton of the new Riverside stand looms out of the darkness. A lot of us are pleasantly surprised how much progress has been made.

When we were last here, the site was a landscape of rubble and bulldozers, a graveyard for the numerous balls that sailed over the touchline as they failed to find their intended target on the pitch.

Today, high pitchside awnings emblazoned with images of the new stand ensure that even the most wayward of passes avoids a similar fate.

I'm struck by how much noise two thousand fans are making, and with our hallmark paper clappers, it sounds more like 20,000.

The atmosphere begins to feel strangely familiar, so

looking forward to hearing how it sounds on Match Of The Day.

And there's a lot to make a noise about, as Fulham's well-oiled gameplan has Jurgen Klopp's 'A' listers in retreat, and duly take a hugely deserved first half lead.

No one expects Liverpool to sit back again in the

second half, and that means the promise of forty-five minutes of stomach-knotting anxiety, willing Fulham to hang on to that one goal lead.

And succeed they nearly did, Liverpool relying on a slightly fortunate penalty to level the score.

Into the final ten minutes, it's heart-in-mouth stuff, a couple of final onslaughts on the Fulham goal, and it ends a 1-1 draw. Fulham have upset the form book with a terrific display.

Much of the chatter among fans is whether we've just watched a team that might actually be equipped for survival in the Premiership, rather than the one that leaked ten goals in its first three games.

Leaving the ground, we emerge into a rain-lashed evening. The warming glow of being back watching our team, and seeing them deliver a beyond-expectations display, soon replaces any discomfort on the walk back along the Thames.

Adieu, hopefully we'll be returning sometime in the new year.

Alas, our joy at watching football again was short-lived, Tier 3 restrictions meaning all games are back to the privations of being played in empty stadiums.

For those of us fortunate enough to have seen the one game this season with fans, it feels as if we've

observed a rare glimpse of an exotic species.