It's all a big con

[AlexW132]

We all get promised promotion by Khan before the new season, saying how we'll rebuild and improve and so on. We all buy it and go pay for our season tickets, and before you know it we're in a relegation battle. We've somehow managed to avoid relegation for the past 2 years, but I think this year if thing don't change quickly we could finally get what was coming to us. Let's not forget that this season we don't have the goals of Moussa and Ross, which, let's face it, singlehandedly saved us the past 2 seasons, so if a relegation battle does happen it's unlikely we'll be grinding out more results. I still maintain the faith and I know it's only September. But things need to change sooner rather than later otherwise we'll be a League 1 club before we know it. The first thing that has to change is stat boy out. The next is that Slav needs to swallow his pride and ditch this stupid tiki taka, 1-millon-passes-with-no-end-product play and adopt a more direct, counter attacking style of play. We have a reasonable amount of pace in the side, and we should be utilising it. That said, knowing how ballsy Slav is, I very much doubt he's going to change it and that for me is a huge issue. If he can get it to work, then fine. But on recent evidence, something tells me it won't stand a chance against the big teams, as indeed it didn't against the likes of Bristol and Brum. I'm just praying that we don't lose all our games in October or I'll then officially write off our season, but I'm still hopeful of at least something better this season.

[bog]

Totally agree. In my opinion football tactics have disappeared somewhere personal. Football can be an easy game but daft tactics can see a side playing with muddled minds. What is it with zonal marking at corners? Cobblers that is. How many goals would have been stopped with defenders on the posts? Coaches have to much say from the touch line, befuddled players looking over to them trying to understand what all the arm waving means. Captains used to be the main man. Just let them get on with it!!!   

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[Fulham76]

Personally I don't think we're in for a relegation battle this season but think we'll be in the bottom half.

Yesterday aside, we've improved the defence just about enough but, as I've said a few times, everyone of us knew we couldn't afford to lose McCormack & Dembele & not replace them, yet that's exactly what we've done.

It would be interesting to know what the thinking behind our striker situation was, whether it was Khan being tight or this idiot with his stats? Either way, absolutely everyone of us knew we'd be in trouble if we didn't replace them - everyone except those that decide our transfers that is...

[Sgt Fulham]

I highly doubt we'll get relegated. If anything, the past two seasons have shown just how bad you have to be to get relegated...
Having said that, I don't think we'll do anything better than 12th.

The most worrying thing for me is that I don't get where we're going wrong as a club. We've changed the manager, changed the team multiple times, spent a lot of money, and yet we're getting battered by Bristol City, with a loanee tearing us a new one. I know we failed to replace Ross McCormack, and MD to an extent (although I was never fully sold), but Chris Martin has a good record in the championship so I don't understand why we're not at least scoring some goals. I look at other teams in the championship and can only select a few from each team that I'd want in the Fulham side, and yet they're finishing well above us?

No idea, just like the Fulham staff it seems.

[H4usuallysitting]

If Mr Khant thought we were going up, he would of started work on the Riverside......he's just going through the motions of his sustainability model, while attendances decline and we become a less attractive club for players to come too....why, I don't know?

[jarv]

Forget about promotion. If I lived in England I would definitely have a season ticket. Second division football can be very entertaining if you recall the 70s at the cottage. Mostly we were a top 6 team and got to a cup final. I would be pleased to relive that. Mullery, Barrett, Strong, Mitchell etc...happy days.
Championship...whats all that nonsense about? Whats wrong with calling it division 2.

[MJG]

What exactly have you been conned out of?

Buying a Season Ticket?

Would you have bought one no matter what or only because Khan/club said they wanted promotion?

[Bill2]

I am optimistic enough to think it is not. To be fair I think some of the players are an improvement over the last few seasons and I think there is scope to move on although I agree not promotion material but not relegation.

Our main problem is in front of goal so the team need to sharpen up their finishing and play the right formation to utilise what we have, which in my humble opinion is with some width and pace. But with this we need to get players in the box quicker, often we have the ball and there is no one in the box should it ever get there.

[AlexW132]

What exactly have you been conned out of?

Buying a Season Ticket?

Would you have bought one no matter what or only because Khan/club said they wanted promotion?

I would have and did. I'm saying it's a bit distasteful to try and make money in that way.

[@jolslover]

What exactly have you been conned out of?

Buying a Season Ticket?

Would you have bought one no matter what or only because Khan/club said they wanted promotion?

I would have and did. I'm saying it's a bit distasteful to try and make money in that way.

Were not going to go down, And I would put money on us finishing higher than we did last season.

[Whitesideup]

A couple of points  ..1)  nobody's being conned. We're just not doing as well as we would hope, and the game yesterday had one of the worst halves for quite a while.

2)  I don't see how Khan is making money. Since buying Fulham he must be quite a bit worse off .. even if that amount of money means very little to him.

3) In tightening up, (apart from second half yesterday) we appear to have sacrificed our ability to attack. The McDonald Parker pairing offers us some solidity in the middle of the park but worryingly little creativity. The ball takes too long to get forward, and we end up facing massed defences. We get few chances ... and we haven't been taking those.

4) Some of the new signings are flattering to deceive. We see good moments but they don't seem to be any that produce anything of real substance. I was very disappointed with a couple of Kebano's attempts on goal yesterday, and Martin's over the last couple of games.  Thought they should have done much better, and both look low on confidence already. Or is Kebano in particular  just not as good as he first looked?

5) Surprised to see such positivity about Johansen. Thought he was as poor as everyone else yesterday, and didn't think he was anything special on Wednesday either.

6) I like Tunnicliffe's endeavour, and don't think he is as technically poor as some  are trying to make out. Certainly one of our strongest tacklers.

[AlexW132]

Relegation is a very real threat at the moment IMO.

Our next few games will be harder than the last four and then we have successive games against Villa and the current top two. Having just seen us take 2 pts from 4 relatively easy games, I can't see us taking more than 6 pts from the next 6, and that will leave us in or around the relegation zone around the end of next month.

Then there are 2 concerns:

1. Can you see the likes of Kebano and Jozabed rolling up their sleeves through the cold winter months to grind out points in a relegation battle?

2. Can you see the manager lasting if he's done even worse than Symons having been given just as much time and financial backing?

Sorry but this could really go t1ts up IMO

Not to mention AFCON

[H4usuallysitting]

I don't remember being promised we'd be promoted. I DO remember that that was our ambition. Evidently two league defeats in September has guaranteed that we won't be promoted.

Guess there's no reason to pay attention to the rest of the season.

Some people.

I think people are concerned about the way we lost.....I'm concerned that none of our players were offside

[Logicalman]

What exactly have you been conned out of?

Buying a Season Ticket?

Would you have bought one no matter what or only because Khan/club said they wanted promotion?

I would have and did. I'm saying it's a bit distasteful to try and make money in that way.

With respect, if you actually believed everything the Owner, Coach, CEO told you at the start of the season, and based your decision-making, or your total understanding of our season-end results on that, I would suggest you have been naive, rather than conned, especially being a Fulham supporter. I don't mean to insult you in that, just a pov that season after season, decade after decade of supporting our great club has pummeled into me as being reality.

[The Rock]

I highly doubt we'll get relegated. If anything, the past two seasons have shown just how bad you have to be to get relegated...
Having said that, I don't think we'll do anything better than 12th.

The most worrying thing for me is that I don't get where we're going wrong as a club. We've changed the manager, changed the team multiple times, spent a lot of money, and yet we're getting battered by Bristol City, with a loanee tearing us a new one. I know we failed to replace Ross McCormack, and MD to an extent (although I was never fully sold), but Chris Martin has a good record in the championship so I don't understand why we're not at least scoring some goals. I look at other teams in the championship and can only select a few from each team that I'd want in the Fulham side, and yet they're finishing well above us?

No idea, just like the Fulham staff it seems.

That takes the biscuit right there. The club hasn't a clue do they?

We don't have an owner that can afford the kind of players to get promoted, and we don't have the Southampton/Watford style "grassroots" system to make it happen either. We have an American owner that's a dud.

I thought we were getting closer with some of the signings, and with style of play SJ started incorporating. The lack of striking talent in trade for a solid defence argument went out the window last weekend though. Hopefully SJ and/or the squad can make the necessary changes because there's a lot of talent to be harvested, but it needs to come together and for the moment it seems the mid table finish with flashes of brilliance and embarrassment seem in the cards like previous years.

Promotion chasing sides don't get run off their own pitch by Bristol City 0-4.

[AlexW132]

What exactly have you been conned out of?

Buying a Season Ticket?

Would you have bought one no matter what or only because Khan/club said they wanted promotion?

I would have and did. I'm saying it's a bit distasteful to try and make money in that way.

With respect, if you actually believed everything the Owner, Coach, CEO told you at the start of the season, and based your decision-making, or your total understanding of our season-end results on that, I would suggest you have been naive, rather than conned, especially being a Fulham supporter. I don't mean to insult you in that, just a pov that season after season, decade after decade of supporting our great club has pummeled into me as being reality.

I understand what you mean, I just feel that after several average seasons we are due a good one and when it turns out to be same old it feels like a kick in the teeth.

[Riversider]

Some of you are deluded and living in La La Land if you honestly don't think that we are currently knee deep in a relegation battle,
Will be interested to read some of your views on Saturday evening if we suffer two more horrible defeats over the next five days.
I would also hope that our planning for the January transfer window started on September 1st so that we can strike early in January no more of this poncing about at the end of January as we've just witnessed at the end of August,
If Liverpool and Tottenham are truly interested in signing Sessegnon let's ask them what players they are prepared to offer us in loan in January, the kind of question that we should have been asking Man City when they came in for Roberts.

[ToodlesMcToot]

I'm truly surprised that some believe that just because the chairman says the club will do whatever it takes to achieve promotion (we've gotten that every season since our relegation. and what else is he supposed to say?) and we have a run of results at the beginning, that the season will be all peaches and cream thru to May.

We've replaced 18 or 19 players with 14 (I believe). That's a ton of change to begin with and one helluva big expectation that, no matter how good we've done our Summer business, it'll all be gotten right. With that much change and, given the state of the club in previous seasons, the reasonable expectation is true improvement over the course of a full season - top half, for me. That would give us a baseline with Slavisa to build upon. Anything more would be icing on the cake.

Please, please let's not start the emotional roller coaster of last season all over again so soon. It becomes divisive and soon enough we'll be back into bickering camps all over again. The board just sucks when that happens.

We still have players gelling into the team and their new lives in London. Let's give them time to come together and for Slavisa to find the right formula.

We will be much improved over last season and we will finish top half. I have that faith in these players and in Slavisa. If we play our way into more, it'll be wonderful.

[AlexW132]

I'm truly surprised that some believe that just because the chairman says the club will do whatever it takes to achieve promotion (we've gotten that every season since our relegation. and what else is he supposed to say?) and we have a run of results at the beginning, that the season will be all peaches and cream thru to May.

We've replaced 18 or 19 players with 14 (I believe). That's a ton of change to begin with and one helluva big expectation that, no matter how good we've done our Summer business, it'll all be gotten right. With that much change and, given the state of the club in previous seasons, the reasonable expectation is true improvement over the course of a full season - top half, for me. That would give us a baseline with Slavisa to build upon. Anything more would be icing on the cake.

Please, please let's not start the emotional roller coaster of last season all over again so soon. It becomes divisive and soon enough we'll be back into bickering camps all over again. The board just sucks when that happens.

We still have players gelling into the team and their new lives in London. Let's give them time to come together and for Slavisa to find the right formula.

We will be much improved over last season and we will finish top half. I have that faith in these players and in Slavisa. If we play our way into more, it'll be wonderful.

When I wrote this post I was still miffed due to the Bristol game so in honesty I was overexaggerating a bit!  fp.gif

[toshes mate]

I have refrained from commenting on Saturday's game because I just didn't want to be just another pallbearer.   It was one of those games which happens in football no matter what team you are, who your manager is, or whereabouts you are in the mix.  What can go wrong will go wrong.  For sixty minutes we could count ourselves to be unfortunate not to be on level terms at least, but chances went begging, and we did a lot of bad things in midfield.  Scott Parker was lucky not to be red carded, but, having said that, three City tackles in the opening forty five merited at least yellow cards but got nought.  City's opener brilliantly taken by Abraham (some loan signing by City I have to say) was a result of a very casual Fulham midfield pass with Sessegnon's flank exposed.  Fulham look dogged and were still in the match until City's second this time from poor defending and zilch closing down.  After that it just went downhill.

Although it doesn't look very bright right now, and, post match, SJ suggested he needs to do what he did pre-season which may mean playing around with different formations and players, the plus points before it fell apart were all good; Martin showed neat touches and good interchanges with team mates, although he missed another header; the defence looked sound apart from the opening goal perhaps missing Kalas but looking stronger on the right with Odoi less exposed;  Johansen shows a lot of skill and promise and I like the look of him; Aluko played well without much luck; Kebano also looked good showing excellent movement and exchanges with team mates.  And so it was a 4-0 drubbing which happened but shouldn't have happened.   If we can bounce back from that and show character then a rather fancy our season will be back of track by the end of next month.

I want to believe Khan owns a football club because he wants football at Craven Cottage and the only way that is going to happen is if Fulham are successful.  I am not going to countenance anything else until it is inevitable to do so.   We have been in despair as a Club before and we beat it.  This season is nowhere near that and so I will still be attending fun parties rather than defeatist funerals.