Chelsea 3-1 Liverpool: 3 talkings points as Palmer leads Blues into top 5 | OneFootball

Chelsea moved back into the Premier League's top five with a convincing 3-1 victory at home to Liverpool on Sunday afternoon.

The reigning top-flight champions produced one of their most muddled displays of the campaign as the celebrations of the past week were brought to an abrupt halt. Enzo Fernandez's third-minute opener set the tone for a one-sided affair at Stamford Bridge. Virgil van Dijk inadvertently forced Jarell Quansah's own goal before halving the deficit himself.

Cole Palmer's 96th-minute penalty added a layer of gloss to the scoreline which Chelsea's dominant display deserved. Victory naturally doesn't alter Liverpool's position, but three points lifted the hosts back into the top five in an increasingly tight race for Champions League qualification.

How the game unfolded

Liverpool's hotly billed guard of honour had barely disbanded by the time the freshly crowned champions fell 1-0 down. Chelsea swanned through their much-changed visitors inside the opening three minutes, skipping down the right flank before Pedro Neto rolled the ball across the box for Fernandez to walk onto.

Chelsea's Argentine midfielder was afforded large swathes of green grass inside the penalty area to take a touch and coolly stroke the ball beyond Alisson, with Liverpool still adjusting to the six alterations made by Arne Slot.

The Merseyside outfit struggled to ever settle down. Liverpool were afforded a monopoly of possession but rarely in any dangerous areas of the pitch. Cody Gakpo's tame effort in the ninth minute which Robert Sanchez caught was the visitor's only attempt on target for more than an hour.

Alisson was far busier. The Brazilian had to be alert to smother a close-range stab from Noni Madueke, who skipped around, behind and through Trent Alexander-Arnold throughout his hour on the pitch. However, Alisson could not keep out a comedic own goal from Jarell Quansah.

Cole Palmer enjoyed one of his best performances in what has been a largely underwhelming calendar year, floating around Stamford Bridge with a restored sense of weightlessness. The England international jinked to the byline and sent a ball into the six-yard box which caused so much havoc, Virgil van Dijk conspired to blaze a clearance off Quansah and beyond Alisson.

Chelsea could and perhaps should have extended their advantage as a combination of Liverpool's goalkeeper and woodwork rebuffed the hosts. As the fickle footballing fates would have it, Slot's visitors scored the game's next goal. Van Dijk capitalised upon Chelsea's feeble attempts at defending a set piece to halve the deficit with Liverpool's second shot on target of the contest in the 85th minute.

There would be no grandstand finish for the champions, who scarcely threatened to produce one. Instead, Palmer brought a merciful end to his 18-game goal drought with a stoppage-time penalty won by the tireless Moises Caicedo.

Liverpool were applauded onto the pitch by Chelsea / Catherine Ivill - AMA/Getty Images

"They won the Premier League and they deserve it," was Enzo Maresca's blunt response to the question of whether Chelsea would clap Liverpool onto the pitch in their first game as top-flight champions.

The Stamford Bridge crowd were not quite so magnanimous, greeting the Liverpool players with a guttural roar of disapproval which drowned out the familiar strains of Chelsea's signature walk-on music, Liquidator. Those jeers soon morphed into wild cheers as Fernandez's goal brought the champions back down to Earth.

Palmer vs Jones II

Cole Palmer (left) went toe-to-toe with Curtis Jones on Sunday / Marc Atkins/Getty Images

Much like the reverse fixture, the meeting of Chelsea and Liverpool was defined by the personal duel between Cole Palmer and Curtis Jones. The Reds prevailed at Anfield largely because Jones kept Palmer quiet, as Slot acknowledged at the time: "He had a difficult job to control Cole Palmer, who is an incredible player with so many qualities. But Curtis did really well and controlled him for most parts of the game."

Slot tasked Jones with the same man-marking brief on Sunday, but Chelsea's first two goals were the result of the English midfielder failing to muzzle his compatriot. Jones twice lost his footing on either side of half-time to allow the ball to roll into Palmer's stride, giving the Chelsea talisman enough time and space to lay the foundations for Fernandez's opener and spark the chaos which concluded with Quansah's own goal.

A tiring Jones could only watch on as Palmer breezed between himself and Conor Bradley in the closing stages, squirrelling along the byline to prod an audacious poke from an ever-narrowing angle onto the inside of the post.

The only time Jones was at least ten yards away from Palmer during a decisive moment of the game was when the Liverpool midfielder watched his direct opponent stroke in a stoppage-time penalty.

Enzo Fernandez completes personal arc

Enzo Fernandez nabbed an early goal / Gaspafotos/MB Media/Getty Images

It's been a chaotic campaign for Enzo Fernandez. The season began with an all-too quickly brushed over racism row which saw the Argentine not only escape punishment for his vile chants against the French national team, but earn himself the status of Chelsea's vice-captain.

Maresca promptly dropped his namesake ahead of Chelsea's reverse fixture against Liverpool in October. "We don't have indispensable players," the manager bluntly explained.

Fernandez has done his best over the subsequent six months to earn that lofty status. While Palmer has endured an elongated dry spell, his midfield colleague is in red hot form. Fernandez's third-minute strike represented his fifth direct goal involvement over Chelsea's last four matches.

Such is the consistent quality of the box-crashing midfielder's two-way displays, Moises Caicedo - a player Maresca dubbed the best defensive midfielder in the world - has been relegated to the role of right-back.

Check out player ratings from Chelsea 3-1 Liverpool here.