Portrait of a Chelsea Fan: This Weekend in the Premier League

After a two-week interlude for pre-World Cup glamour friendlies which taught us: a) that the international break can actually be decent; and b) WIN OVER HOLLAND, DRAW WITH ITALY, FOOTBALL'S COMING HOME, the Premier League was back in action this weekend.

Here’s the best of it in the form of The Very Good Football Column. Wait, no, sorry, This Weekend in the Premier League.

"He's a scourge on the game," says Terry, 45, Chelsea home and away since '85, England home and away since the day he was fuckin' born. "If that Dele Alli tries any of that diving nonsense today, I swear, I'll run on the pitch and spark him out."

Three hours later, the warm glow of the pub a distant memory, Terry is resignedly watching Dele Alli spark out Chelsea with two second-half goals at Stamford Bridge. Not only is Dele a handsome, metropolitan 21-year-old with the raw skill to tear apart the reigning Premier League champions and a talent for simulation, he’s also the future of the England national team.

In fairness, it's not just Chelsea fans who are livid with Dele for cupping his ear to the home fans after setting Tottenham on the way to victory. He is the sort of figure who – among anyone other than Spurs supporters – unites young and old, rich and poor, Chelsea diehard and yuppie Stamford Bridge day-tripper in rage. Look at the faces above and you see a kaleidoscope of human emotion, from leering bald lads and sneering Sunday League dads to 20-something trainee accountants trying to launch themselves headfirst out of the stands in apoplexy. It's a portrait of the universal Chelsea fan, united in blind fury at a maddeningly gifted youngster from Milton Keynes.

It’s not easy being a steward at West Ham. If fans aren’t invading the pitch, stealing the corner flags and fighting among themselves in the stands – as happened a few weeks ago at the London Stadium – they are filming their safety personnel taking brief naps on the sidelines and publishing the embarrassing footage online. Add to that the fact the West Ham stewards were roundly criticised in the national press after the Hammers' last home game against Burnley, in which the club's stewarding operation struggled to contain an outpouring of anger against the board, and it starts to look like one of the least enviable jobs in football. Oh, and also they have to watch 14th-placed West Ham on a weekly basis.

This seems to have led the West Ham stewards to adopt a siege mentality, made manifest in their bizarre new outfits. Supposedly with the aim of catching pitch invaders, this weekend's match against Southampton saw them don goggles and football boots along with their high-vis jackets, making them look like members of some mad biker gang from a rejected cut of Mad Max: Fury Road. Either that, or David Moyes thinks he's found a loophole in the rules and can now sneakily bring on stewards as rolling substitutes. Let’s face it – if a random guy in a high-vis kit and Adidas Predators came on for a bit to give Pablo Zabaleta a breather, would anybody notice?

While it's fair enough that the police want to soften their image and show the public that they are, in fact, normal people who just so happen to have the power to detain you for 24 hours without charge, there is honestly nothing worse than police Twitter accounts attempting football banter. Though they usually limit themselves to congratulatory posts about intercepting fan coaches and pouring all their alcohol down the drain, the force sometimes go as far as tweeting footballers directly, just for the absolute banter.

That’s what Stoke Police did earlier this season as Arsenal lost 1-0 at the Britannia for what seemed like their 100th consecutive visit, a result which was reversed this weekend as Arsene Wenger’s side beat the Potters 3-0 at the Emirates. Having hit Mesut Ozil with a classic "missing person" joke of the sort usually seen on @SoccerMemes or @TrollFootball, Stoke Police even saw fit to end their tweet with #Banter, just in case it wasn't obvious what they were attempting. Needless to say, any banter that needs to be hashtagged as such is painfully, chillingly awful. By the same token, shame on Ozil for stooping so low.

"When I came to England they all said I was old and I came in a wheelchair. After three months I conquered England and they said I was flying." These are the words of Zlatan Ibrahimovic ahead of his goalscoring debut for LA Galaxy this weekend, the club he joined in late March after securing an early release from Manchester United. While it’s exactly the sort of quote on which he’s built his aggressively silly personal brand – a brand so successful that many of us now unquestioningly refer to him as "Zlatan", a one-word moniker that makes him sound like a forgotten cast member from ITV's Gladiators – it's also such bollocks that it feels necessary to call it out.

After three months in England, Zlatan had scored six goals in all competitions and won the Community Shield. By the end of the season he'd also won the Europa League and League Cup. Granted, as well as adding the three naffest trophies in world football to his long list of individual accolades, he managed a respectable total of 17 goals in the Premier League last season, which is more than most players on the cusp of their late thirties. It's hardly "conquering England", though, is it? The last big front man to win the same trifecta of trophies here in so short a space of time was Emile Heskey, and he will always be more of a Premier League legend than Zlatan.

@W_F_Magee