Thursday Fulham Stuff (18/04/13)...

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Jol's early call to wideman

Fulham have recalled winger Alexander Kacaniklic from his loan spell at Burnley to cover for the injured Damien Duff.

The 21-year-old has made six appearances for the Lancashire club since joining them at the start of March. However, Kacaniklic has now been recalled by Martin Jol and could be involved in this weekend's home clash with Arsenal. The Sweden international has already appeared for Fulham 19 times this season, netting three goals. Duff missed Wednesday night's 3-0 home defeat to Chelsea with a thigh strain and is in a race against time to be ready to face Arsenal.


http://www.clubcall.com/fulham/jols-early-call-to-wideman-1577996.html?

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Opta Evaluation

Chelsea may have left Craven Cottage with what looked a comfortable scoreline on Wednesday evening, but in terms of overall play and possession of the football, Fulham can be pleased with the way we put our local rivals under pressure for decent chunks of the game.

Both sides were guilty of giving the ball away on occasion, although Fulham less so as Martin Jol's men could boast an 83 per cent pass accuracy in comparison to the Blues' 80 per cent. In overall successful passes made, Fulham completed 58 more than our UEFA Champions League-chasing neighbours.

Keeping the ball is all well and good but if you fail to take your chances then you tend to get punished in the Barclays Premier League, and that's what happened to the Whites. Chelsea only had six more attempts on goal but captain John Terry was in clinical form, scoring two of his three attempts, after his centre-back partner David Luiz had given his side the lead practically out of nothing.

Eyong Enoh was handed a third consecutive start in the Fulham engine room and the industrious midfielder didn't disappoint on his first outing at the Cottage. Along with Dimitar Berbatov, he made more tackles than any other Fulham player (five), and he also made more successful passes than anyone else on the pitch (48).

The Cameroon international finished the game with an incredible pass accuracy of 98 per cent, with Chelsea's Ramires the second most productive with 45 successful balls (93.8 per cent accuracy). We've taken the below snapshot from our new Match Centre to show the pair's passes throughout the 90 minutes. The players are depicted by their squad numbers (33 and 7, respectively), and you can see that Enoh was guilty of misplacing just one pass all game, while Ramires saw three go astray. (Players were attacking from bottom to top).



The Average Player Position tab from the Match Centre (below) demonstrates how congested the middle of the field was, with Fernando Torres, Enoh, Giorgos Karagounis, Frank Lampard, Ramires and Berbatov all depicted within the centre circle – Fulham are the white and blue icons, Chelsea grey and yellow.

Torres was involved in a lot of Chelsea's play and the Average Position screenshot suggests that he did so by coming deep to receive the ball. This gave Juan Mata, Victor Moses and Eden Hazard the chance to push forward, with the trio proving to be the most offensive players in the Blues' side.

Berbatov slotted in just behind Mladen Petrić and the screenshot shows that they tried to get in between Luiz and Terry, while Urby Emanuelson looked to get behind Branislav Ivanovic, who was keen to push forward whenever possible.



The Heatmap backs up the theory of the Average Player Position statistics that the game was often played narrowly, except when the full backs got involved.

The map below on the left depicts the movement of Fulham defenders John Arne Riise and Sascha Riether, while Ryan Bertrand and Ivanovic are shown in the image on the right. Interestingly, both right-backs looked to get forward and into the opposition half more often than their colleagues on the left who took a slightly more conservative approach.

If you compare Fulham's Heatmap to the Average Player Position screenshot, you can see that Riether's advancing runs down the right allowed Bryan Ruiz to cut in to his more favoured central role.



Head over to the Match Centre to try out our new interactive tabs for yourself.



http://www.fulhamfc.com/news/2013/april/18/opta-evaluation