Can Fulham return to winning ways at Brighton?
Written by Jack Stroudley on 28th October 2023
Jack Stroudley looks ahead to our trip to the south coast on Sunday.
It’s been a pretty mixed week for Fulham. The doom and gloom of Monday’s performance against Tottenham was tempered by the news of Marco Silva’s contract extension. A fantastic piece of news for the future of this football club, it almost seems secondary that we’ve got a game this weekend! We head to the AmEx Stadium for another tricky away tie, we’ve got a decent record at this ground in recent years but can we get another result?
The opposition
When you think about positive, attack-minded football one of the first sides who spring to mind are Brighton who under Roberto De Zerbi have gone from strength to strength. Using the transfer market wisely to recruit players for cheap and sell for large profits have allowed the Seagulls to slowly grow as a club with them currently sat in seventh place and in the Europa League. There’s a lot of attacking threat at De Zerbi’s disposal with Joao Pedro, Kauro Mitoma and Ansu Fati all springing to mind.
That being said, Brighton may come into this one on the back of a European hangover following a historic 2-0 win over Ajax in midweek. They’re also prone to the odd slip up at home with the likes of West Ham winning at the AmEx this season and even back to last season when they failed to beat us and were comfortably dismantled by Everton.
How do we prepare?
So that’s the lowdown on our opposition, but how should we line up on Sunday?
I’d make one change to the side that lost 2-0 to Tottenham on Monday night with Alex Iwobi replacing Andreas Pereira.
The Brazilian midfielder has been off the boil now for quite some time and I think not having a real focal point in attack is causing him to struggle to create chances. I’d refresh things a bit and bring in Iwobi or even Cairney to add some pace and dribbling ability on the counter.
I’d swap Calvin Bassey and Tim Ream so that the Nigerian is back on his preferred left-hand side. Bassey really struggled to on Monday night with his passing ability causing our own downfall and with Ream being more adaptable and comfortable on the ball I’d therefore swap the two.
The final verdict
I’m actually looking forward to this game quite a lot, we travel well down to Brighton and make good noise usually. I think Brighton may struggle to get going in this game and I genuinely think Fulham are going to snatch a point.
