Fulham beat AFC Wimbledon 3-0 at Craven Cottage in the Carabao Cup last night, two headers in five minutes before half-time settling a cup tie decades in the making.
It’s not a local derby that happens very often: the last time the two teams played was 25 years ago and it was a draw. The other unlikely happening? Two brothers on opposite sides.
One Sessegnon had a hand in the first goal, and the other conceded it. Kenny Tete’s deep cross on 37 minutes came across to Ryan Sessegnon, Fulham’s left-back, as he contested it with his marker. The ball came off the pair of them, dropped in the six-yard box, where Emile Smith Rowe had ghosted in to head past Nathan Bishop.
Five minutes later Tete crossed again and Rodrigo Muniz diverted it back across goal and inside the post. It was Muniz’s first goal since the opening game of last season, four months of which he missed through injury.
Steven Sessegnon, Ryan’s twin brother, was playing at the other end for Wimbledon. Both were born in Roehampton, both joined Fulham’s academy at eight, and Steven only arrived at Plough Lane in the summer, on a free transfer from Wigan after his contract expired. By Fulham’s own reckoning it was the first time in their careers the two had faced each other on a pitch.
The pick of the three goals was the last. Macaulay Zepa, 18, came on for Oscar Bobb at half-time for his senior debut and, in the third minute of stoppage time, slipped Gonzalo García through. García sprinted clear of his marker, rounded Bishop and finished from a tight angle. It was his second goal in two games since Fulham signed him from Real Madrid.
Álvaro Arbeloa has his first win as Fulham manager and a trip to West Ham in the third round, in the week beginning either 7 or 14 September.
The numbers were as lopsided as that suggests: 79 per cent possession, 29 shots to five.
The crowd was not. There were 17,714 in the ground, and 4,973 of them were Wimbledon supporters, packed into the Putney End. That is more than half the crowd Plough Lane draws for a league game, taken across London on a Thursday night to watch a 3-0 defeat. That is solid fan support. They stayed to applaud their players off.
Twenty-five years, and a different club
A local derby round here usually means Fulham against Chelsea, or Fulham against Brentford. The last Fulham v Wimbledon was on 28 April 2001, at Craven Cottage. It finished 1-1, both goals penalties, Luis Boa Morte for Fulham and Jason Euell for Wimbledon. It was Fulham’s final home game of a season already won: 101 points, ten clear of Blackburn Rovers, the Division One title, and the end of 33 years away from the top flight. Jean Tigana and Mohamed Al Fayed lifted the trophy on the pitch afterwards. Fulham have spent most of the quarter-century since in the Premier League.
Wimbledon went the other way, fast. Relegated from the Premier League in 2000 and playing home games at Selhurst Park in Croydon, the club’s chairman argued it could not survive where it was. On 28 May 2002 the Football Association accepted an independent three-man commission’s decision, taken by two votes to one, permitting Wimbledon FC to move 56 miles up the M1 to Milton Keynes.
Two days later, supporters who refused to follow founded a new club. Wimbledon FC relocated in September 2003 and was renamed MK Dons the year after.
So last night was the first competitive fixture between Fulham and AFC Wimbledon, a club that began in 2002 in the ninth tier of English football, won five promotions in nine years, was elected to the Football League in 2011, and returned to Plough Lane in November 2020.
It is owned by its supporters through the Dons Trust, which holds more than three-quarters of the shares, and its ground holds 9,215. Craven Cottage held nearly twice that on Thursday for a second-round cup tie, which is roughly the shape of the gap between the two clubs now.
Alan Cork, who played for Wimbledon through the Crazy Gang years and later for Fulham, had a foot in both camps. He was in the matchday programme rather than the dugout, writing about his time at each. And the sequel will not take another 25 years. Wimbledon play MK Dons at Plough Lane on 17 September, live on Sky, a fixture their supporters are declining to call a derby.
Fulham: a new manager, a rebuilt front line, and a defence to sort out
This is Fulham’s first season in five years without Marco Silva, who left in June to replace José Mourinho at Benfica. Arbeloa, 43, arrived on 7 July on a three-year contract, having run Real Madrid’s final 28 games of last season on an interim basis. He has never managed in England.
He made ten changes on Thursday from the side beaten 3-2 by Chelsea on Monday, keeping only Bobb, and said afterwards that his players had done a good job in difficult circumstances. “It’s going to be a long journey, and we are on our way,” he told his post-match press conference.
The 79 per cent possession was not an accident. Josh King, writing in the matchday programme, described the side as more possession-based under Arbeloa than under Silva, with a higher press out of it, and on Thursday, against a team that sat in, it looked exactly like that.
Two academy graduates got their debuts, Zepa the headline act among them. Chibby Nwoko came on when Luc de Fougerolles, who played for Canada at the World Cup this summer, was unable to continue after a heavy challenge just after the hour, forcing Shea Charles to drop into defence. Charles, a £26m signing from Southampton, had been making his first start in midfield.
Arbeloa has spent to build that side: García cost £34.2m, César Palacios £8.56m, Jonah Kusi-Asare £5.2m from Bayern Munich.
Fulham let Raúl Jiménez and Harry Wilson leave for nothing when their contracts expired, sold Issa Diop and Saša Lukić to Ipswich, and then conceded three at home to Chelsea in a match they were still chasing at the whistle. Captain Tom Cairney is out with a knee injury and was the side’s only absentee on Thursday. A squad that finished 11th in each of the last two seasons has been made younger, more expensive and, for the moment, less settled. Sunday’s trip to Sunderland will say more than Thursday did.
Wimbledon: fan-owned, back in the third tier, and yet to score
They finished 19th in League One last season, their first back in the third tier after three years away, and they have started this one without scoring a league goal: beaten 3-0 at Huddersfield, then a 0-0 at home to Reading in front of 8,334. They sit 23rd of 24, with a point.
Johnnie Jackson took over in 2022 and led the club up at Wembley in May 2025, when Myles Hippolyte’s shot from the edge of the box in first-half stoppage time beat Walsall in front of 50,947. Hippolyte was again Wimbledon’s likeliest source of something on Thursday, and it was his cross that Callum Maycock met with a first-time shot that went just wide before Fulham found their range. Andy Yiadom, making only his second start since joining from Reading, had already tested Benjamin Lecomte from a corner.
Jackson made six changes of his own and was not unhappy with what he got. He said afterwards that he was disappointed with the two first-half goals but that his side’s shape was outstanding, that Fulham had a lot of the ball and found it hard to play through them, and that his players had done the club proud. Nathan Bishop, back in goal, kept the score respectable with saves from Zepa and from Fulham’s Brazilian signing Kevin around the hour. After the break Wimbledon managed one effort of note, Hippolyte from 25 yards, narrowly over.
Maycock is also the reason they were at Craven Cottage at all: his equaliser in the 98th minute against Newport County rescued the shoot-out that took Wimbledon through the first round.
Jackson’s summer was built on free transfers and experience: Steven Sessegnon, Yiadom from Reading, Dan Sweeney from Stevenage, Zack Nelson from Luton, Jayden Stockley from Port Vale, with James Tilley bought from Wycombe and Harry Cornick arriving from Bristol City this week. Ollie Harrison is on loan from Chelsea. The squad has changed a great deal. The goals have not arrived.
Five shots and 21 per cent of the ball is not a disgrace at a Premier League ground, and Wimbledon committed nine fouls to Fulham’s six. A club whose whole model rests on filling a 9,215-seat ground it built itself cannot afford a relegation fight in the season it is trying to settle.
Both play again on Sunday afternoon. Fulham are at Sunderland, still looking for their first league point under Arbeloa. Wimbledon are at home to Wigan, still looking for their first win and their first league goal, with Steven Sessegnon facing the club he left when his contract expired.
