The
natural order of things for Fulham, when they’ve been in the Premier League, is
to be one of the teams bobbing around the bottom six with a very real chance of
being drawn into the relegation battle. No such problems now of course, partly
due to the management of Marco Silva And good recruitment of players, and
partly due to the fact that they managed to stay in the Premier League exactly
the right time that the dynamics changed financially and it became a League
where there are 17 full memberships and three 1-year visitors passes every
season.

If we just look at Fulham the team, then they are decent and deserve to be
having the upper mid-table season that they are having.  Shrewd recruitment of players who have been
discarded by traditionally bigger Premier League clubs has built them a squad
that is very capable of sneaking into a Europa league or conference league
place at the end of the season.  Their
whole squad is littered with players who were at other Premier League or top
foreign clubs before, so there is little risk of signing a player who doesn’t adapt.
They have built a team of players who were experienced at Premier League or
decent European level before they joined. 
The list is long…. Leno (Arsenal), Andersen (Palace), Castagne
(Leicester), Iwobi (Everton), Berge (Sheffield Utd), Jimenez (Wolves), Traore
(Wolves and Barcelona), Wilson (Bournemouth), Smith-Rowe (Arsenal) and so the
list goes on. It’s an object lesson to teams who think you can recruit solely
from academies or from unheard of players sampling English football for the
first time.  Then of course you have to
make the player better.  Alex Iwobi for
example, was discarded by Arsenal and then Everton and now looks the best
player he has ever been in a Fulham shirt. Raul Jimenez was a bit of a gamble
but he has paid back that gamble to be their top goal scorer this season. Also
via Wolves came Adama Traore and whilst I still severely question how he ended
up looking exactly like that, no one can deny he is a proper handful, not that
you can get a handful of him because of all the baby oil on his arms.

Manager, Marco Silva has always had a streak of arrogance about him like a Poundshop
Mourinho and he clearly thinks that it’s about time he moved to a bigger club
because he’s just started talking up how good a job he’s done at Fulham. Fair
play but careful what you wish for Marco. Everton didn’t exactly work out did
it?

Such has been the woeful state of this season, there has been an air of
positivity around Saints this week based on getting a last-minute draw against
the team in 17th. This is a big game for Simon Rusk and for the club because of
the abysmal home record that Saints have endured over the last three Premier
League seasons and because of the fact that are two remaining home fixtures
after this are against Manchester City and Arsenal, so realistically this is
the last chance for a home win before next season and of course we need to
acquire The Point of Destiny to end talk of Derby.

Team news and just the one change with Saints with Tall Paul clearly not fit as
he’s not even on the bench. Into the team comes Ross Stewart, which is a
redemption story just waiting to happen. 
As the game starts it quickly becomes apparent that Fulham are going to
have most of the ball and that most of their attacking is going to come down
our right hand side with Willian trying to cut in on his right foot and Sessegnon
going outside. An early warning shot is fired by the Brazilian as he cuts onto
his right foot and curls it about a yard wide of Rambo‘s far post.

Twenty minutes gone and more or less from our first attack, Manning buys a free
kick off of Pereira as he goes to clear and it’s about 25 yards out in line
with the edge of the penalty area. Our record from free kicks this season has
been spectacularly bad but lo, a fucking miracle as Manning skims over the free
kick at a perfect height and Jack Stephens gets up to flick it past Leno and in
at the fare post. Fucking hell, we scored a free kick.  Here comes The Point of Destiny, it’s in the
fucking bag and we are massive and we will win this, beat Leicester next week
to go above them and when Manchester City and Bournemouth get deducted a
hundred points each, then we’ll stay up.

Meanwhile, back on this planet, the good news is that Saints are still posing
an attacking threat despite going ahead and after a Fulham attack is broken up
by a Big Les, KWP puts the ball in behind to allow Ross Stewart to run onto it.
 He gets to the ball first before Bassey
but the big defender moves across and shuts the door with Stewart being swatted
away by the bigger man. There is a half arsed appeal for a penalty but that’s
never getting given.

Bassey meets his match soon after though as he tries to muscle Fernandes off
the ball and after an almighty tussle, the little Portuguese kid emerges with
the ball and we spread it out to the left-hand side. The ball gets popped
through to Sulemana and Andersen comes clattering across in untidy fashion but
unlike any other winger, Sulemana stays on his feet rather than going down and
then hits his usual daisy cutter straight to the keeper. Wrong decisions all
round.

Fulham are having most of the possession without getting anything on target and
the frustration is obvious as Tete crosses from the right hand side and Raul Jimenez
nearly puts his volley out of the ground. 
A few more minutes of defending and half time.

To be fair, we’ve done okay and Fulham of look limited but Marco Silva is
clearly not very happy at halftime because Berge and Pereira don’t come out and
instead it’s Lukic and the big sprinter/boxer himself, Adama Traore. Ryan
Manning must have muttered a silent “oh fuck off” to himself at this point,
when he saw what he’s got to play against in the second half.

Traore is a strange footballer, because he’s not very good but he’s so big and
fucking quick that he is effective, and he barrels his way across the pitch
before finding Willian about 20 yards out and his curled effort flies
beautifully past Ramsdale before crashing into the post. You can see the
problem straight away, that we seem to be ten yards deeper than we were in the
first half and just allowing Fulham to play

We have an increasingly rare attack as Downes brings the ball forward with a
diagonal run towards the left and finds Sulemana and what wrong decision will
come out next?  Eventually it’s a pretty
aimless chip to the back post which gets headed away and drops down, with Downes
turning on it on the edge of the box and the ball eventually defects left and
KWP takes and smashes it but Leno takes off to pull off a perfectly executed ‘one
for the cameras’ save.

On the hour mark, it’s time for fresh legs to make our team weaker, but it’s
understandable as Ross Stewart has to go off to be replaced with Cameron
Archer. Archer surprises everyone who has seen him play this season by getting
the ball on the right hand side and bursting past Bassey before trying to put
in a cross which pings off the outside of the post and is eventually cleared.

Emile Smith-Rowe has come on for Fulham in place of Willan and it is he who
bursts into the box, lost by Fernandes, to pick up a chipped ball in from Sessegnon
and drive a goalward effort it defelcts off of Bednarek’s boot, high over
Ramsdale and into the net. Fuck off. 25 minutes to go and now hanging on for The
Point of Destiny will be all that matters.

Sulemana then has to make a decision as to which way to walk off the pitch
after being substituted and he successfully picks one, to be replaced on the
left-hand side by Dibling. Fulham are now camped on the edge of the box now and
we don’t seem to be able to get the ball away. 
It’s lucky that Traore decides to take on a shot rather than pass it to
someone more talented, and curls it in shit fashion over the bar. Traore is at
it again a minute later, dribbling across the box before finding Smith-Rowe in
the middle and his shot is brilliantly tipped away by Ramsdale.

88 minutes and what the fuck?   Two
minutes plus extra time to earn The Point of Destiny and oh this is absolute
fucking murder as it’s James Bree coming on for Fernandes. It looks like KWP
has been pushed forward so this is going to be horrible. Meanwhile, on the
other side, Traore gets down our left to the byline and hangs a ball up into
the middle, which Raul Jimenez can only head straight at Rambo.

90, 91, 92 minutes and we can’t get the ball away in Smith-Rowe picks up on the
right, finds Traore and his cross into the middle his met by Sessegnon,
who has come from the left and is completely unmarked about 8 yards out and
stoops to head the ball past Ramsdale to give Fulham the win. Fuck sake.  The Point of Destiny is snatched away. 
Needless to say, after failing to attack for the best part of 45 minutes, we
don’t have a lot to offer in the two minutes that remain.

Well, fuck. I should know better but I genuinely thought we were gonna win that
game and that Fulham wouldn’t score but of course, once they did, via a bastard
big deflection, the second goal did seem kind of inevitable, especially when we
made the substitution of creeping death as the last few minutes ticked round. The
obsession the managers have with making substitutions will never fail to baffle
me. We’ve defended well for 88 minutes with the same five defenders and the two
midfielders in front of them so naturally, change the right hand side of that
defence with two minutes to go. Guess who scored for Fulham, yes, the left back
who ran into the area untracked. Not only are we bringing on James Bree, who is
going to make any Premier League team worse but we then reshuffle the defensive
unit. We always manage to be our own worst enemies it’s not always the case but
in the context of this season and with this group of players, if things are
going well, then you are better off just fucking leaving it.

There were many parallels with the Villa game a couple of weeks ago and that we
defended well until well into the second half very well but the concentration
levels required and the quality that the opposition can bring off the bench,
compared to the lack of quality on ours, did for us in the end. Like with Villa,
who brought three goal scorers off the bench, Fulham brought on Traore, who set
up the winner and Smith-Rowe who scored the first and had ahand in the second.

Both goals were conceded were down to an untracked runner turning up unmarked
in the middle of our penalty area. Smith-Rowe ran off the back of Fernandes and
Sessegnon wandered in from left back.  In
the first half we were decent value for the lead that we had from Jack Stephens
flicked header from Manning’s cross . It just goes to show that set pieces can
be undefendable if the delivery is right and it also highlights how poor our
deliveries from set pieces have been in general this season.  We had one other chance of note in the game
with KWP finding himself in the area and bringing a decent save out of Leno.
Other than that though, it was very slim pickings and we seem to be playing
with no thought of attacking in the entire second half, which against a good
side, is not often going to work. You have to maintain some sort of attacking
threat otherwise the opposition can just do what they like with no thought of
consequence.

The starting 11, in the main did pretty well. Les and Flynn were outstanding in
the centre of midfield and the three central defenders were all very solid.
Ross Stewart got through 60 minutes and looked half decent I thought. I still
can’t really work out what kind of player he is. There is a temptation, because
he is 6 foot 3, to think of him as a target man, but he’s not really and he
wants to run in behind. There was one incident in the first half where he ran
in behind Calvin Bassey and just didn’t have the strength to do anything once
he got to the penalty area and it’s then that you realise that regardless of
all the injuries, he has never played at this level before.

Positives are that Simon Rusk has identified our best starting XI and changed
that as little as possible.  No one can
fault the effort of the players either and there’s been plenty of times this season when
that was up for debate.  He’s also worked
out that Les and Flynn have to play the full 90 and that happened for the second
game running.  Negatives for Rusk are the
aforementioned late sub and tinkering and once again that shone a poor light on
our squad, as did the fact that the best option with Tall Paul’s injury is a
player who hasn’t played for nearly three years.  Stewart was the best option because the
strikers we expected to rely on this season – Archer, Brereton-Diaz and
Armstrong are either crap, or no longer here, or both.

A
final word for today is reserved for Marco Silva and the word is twat.  Some more words are horrible entitled little
shit.  How dare we set up to defend and
be solid when we’ve had the season we’ve had. 
Go fuck yourself you dickhead.

Onwards and it’s time for El Crappico and a trip to the King Power to play
Leicester next week. They have not scored in the last nine home league games so
they need a goal and we need a point, so 1-1 it is then.