Queens Park Rangers v Chelsea

Joey! Joey! Give us a wave! Photograph: Tony O’Brien/Action Images

The teams are out on the pitch. Football’s on its way. We haven’t had any for 30 minutes!

Chelsea’s away kit looks like something out of Tron. It’s horrendous.

The first email of three. “LOVE those team selections,” says Paul Taylor. “It’s obvious that both managers, with many years of experience in hand, have carefully looked at their players to see who’s healthy and who’s on form and who needs a boost, have studied their opponents’ likely selection and strategy, have considered team needs for upcoming ties, have put together a solid game-day strategy for a win or draw as appropriate, and have selected the eleven lads who are best suited to attain, in sum, all these goals. What mere observer could question such wisdom?”

Ed Chamberlain has just said that QPR v Chelsea is a “relatively new rivalry”. Really? It’s not as if both clubs have just been invented. Ignore that open goal.

Here are your teams. Yes, that is Heidar Helguson up front for QPR.

QPR: Kenny, Young, Ferdinand, Hall, Hill; Wright-Phillips, Barton, Derry, Faurlin, Taarabt; Helguson. Subs: Murphy, Orr, Bothroyd, Mackie, Buzsaky, Smith, Puncheon.

Chelsea: Cech; Bosingwa, Luiz, Terry, Cole; Meireles, Mikel, Lampard; Sturridge, Drogba, Mata. Subs: Turnbull, Ivanovic, Romeu, Malouda, McEachran, Kalou, Anelka.

Referee: Chris Foy (Merseyside)

Just have a look at some of these names: Danny Maddix, Andy Impey, Mark Brazier, Ian Holloway, Bradley Allen of the Allen Family, Danny Dichio, Dimitri Kharine, Dimtri Kharine’s tracksuit bottoms, Eddie Newton, Andy Myers, Paul Furlong, John Spencer, Dan Petrescu, Ruud Gullit. Those are just some of the players who took part the last time these two sides met in the league at Loftus Road. In many ways, this was a better, more innocent time. Neither side was up to much, Chelsea’s foreign revolution only just whirring into motion and QPR on their way to relegation from the Premier League. Rangers, of course, had been hit hard by the sale of Les Ferdinand to Newcastle the previous summer, which meant they had to rely on Danny Dichio to score their goals. You do the math(s). Anyway the date was 2 January 1996, Michael Jackson’s Earth Song was top of the charts, there were some cracking haircuts on that day’s episode of Countdown, football still hadn’t come home and Paul Furlong’s goal earned Chelsea a 2-1 win at QPR.

Plenty has happened to the two sides since then; plenty of it good for Chelsea and bad for QPR. You presumably don’t require a potted history of events at Stamford Bridge. Suffice to say, much of it is centred around some smiling, mute Russian guy buying them in 2003. As for QPR, they’ve been bought out roughly 473 times, had a similar number of managers, relegated to League One, lost a play-off final, promoted back to the Championship, before finally getting back to the Premier League this season. It’s been a long 15 years, in which time Chelsea have won the league three times and much else besides (you don’t need the potted history but can have it anyway). The sides’ paths have rarely crossed since then.

There have been two meetings in the cups at Stamford Bridge, both won 1-0 by Chelsea, but nothing in the league until today. QPR have already had a warm-up west London derby this season and it didn’t go too well, the match ending in a 6-0 humiliation at the hands of Fulham. If we assume that Chelsea are three times better than QPR, it’s going to be 18-0 today.

Ok, so a slight exaggeration there. But QPR are yet to win at home. No better time than the present and all that, but only the hopelessly deluded would expect that to change today. In Chelsea’s last away game, they put five past Bolton, who put four past QPR. Sure, the Loftus Road pitch is tight and the atmosphere will be charged, but it’s nothing Chelsea haven’t seen before. They’re starting to click under the magnificent Andre Villas-Boas now, even if they’re not quite reaching the Barcelona standards Frank Lampard reckons they are. Put it this way: it’s Fitz Hall and Anton Ferdinand v Didier Drogba, Danny Sturridge and Juan Mata.