Article - The relegation battle

[hongkongfulham]

My go to website for football has Fulham at the top of its winners and losers weekly piece when they usually never get but a passing message as a loser. Feel free to have a read!

https://www.football365.com/news/premier-league-winners-losers-mourinho-liverpool-ancelotti

Fulham and the relegation battle

Fulham's season can be split into two unequal halves, the first of which ended in late November. On October 5 and 6, Fulham signed Tosin Adarabioyo, Terence Kongolo, Joachim Andersen and Ruben Loftus-Cheek. They joined Ademola Lookman, Alphonse Areola, Ola Aina and Kenny Tete, all of whom arrived at Craven Cottage in September. Suddenly Scott Parker had more than half a new team.

In hindsight, Fulham should have got their business done earlier. That's not really a criticism, given the uniquely short summer break and the difficulty in making loan signings before parent clubs were sure that those players were surplus to requirements. But recruiting so many new players late in the window meant that it took an inevitable bedding-in period for them to settle. During which, Fulham took four points from nine league games and gave themselves a monumental task to survive relegation.

But since then, we've really seen the benefits of Fulham's recruitment. Of the seven players with the most league minutes for Fulham this season, only André-Frank Zambo Anguissa joined the club before this summer and he had spent the entirety of the previous season on loan at Villarreal. Since that ninth league game of the season, Fulham have only lost four times. More impressively than that, only Manchester City have a better goals-per-game defence since. That's extraordinary for a promoted club that had a history of defensive sloppiness.

The argument from Parker's critics (and it carries some weight) is that Fulham's manager applied the handbrake too much in mid-season. Fulham drew plenty of matches, but they would have been better losing a couple and winning a couple of those. But Parker reasoned (again, not unreasonably) that Fulham's survival bid was dead in the water without their solid defence.

Finding that balance is still the challenge, particularly given that Aleksandar Mitrovic is no longer a regular starter (no other Fulham player scored more than eight times in the Championship last season). They have scored more than once in two of their last 15 league games, which puts an awful lot of pressure on the clean sheets.

But Fulham have given themselves a chance. The new players are fully acclimatised, Fulham work as hard as any team in the league and they are a regular goalscorer away from staying up with ease. They might still be good enough to pip Newcastle United.

And we needed this. There might still be some top-four interest, but with the title race looking like it's over and West Brom and Sheffield United succumbed to their fate, the last thing Premier League season needed ahead of the European Championship was an absence of tension over its final months. Good on you, Fulham.

[FFC In Oz]

It's odd but I feel more confident with this side playing against the likes of Arsenal and Spurs than I would against Burnley or Palace.

Those sort of sides would dominate possession and allow us to play a more fluid counter-attacking system.

When other teams sit back and make us do the hard work in possession and try and force an opening, we tend to struggle more IMO