Saturday shows Fulham still has work to do to harden its weak underbelly
Written by Drew Heatley on 28th October 2024
Saturday was brilliant. And then it was rubbish, so, so rubbish. Our third late gut-punch already this season, all from players who haven’t scored any other goals this season. Typical.
Football is never this simple, but we should have five extra points from those games alone. If you factor out these last-minute brain fades, we could be sixth.
What’s so frustrating is that we deserve those five points, they should be ours. We graft, we dominate, we get into promising positions time and time again, just to throw it all away.
Understandably this creates discussion around our “soft underbelly”. When the going gets tough, do Fulham have a tendency to blow it? Current evidence suggests yes. No team has lost more points than us in the last 15 minutes in games.
It seemed like Marco had found the formula for seeing out games. We saw him bring on an extra defender against Newcastle and Forest, and we saw those games out. However, against Everton bringing on an extra defender undoubtedly cost us three points. We dropped deeper, we allowed Everton to pump balls into the box, and we eventually blew it.
It’s these moments in games that could be so pivotal come the end of the season. Five points, already, could be the difference between a top-half finish and mid-table mediocrity. Even worse, it could be the difference between the top-half and Europe.
Despite all of this, I have faith that this is fixable. We do lack some street smarts, but things used to be so much worse. For years before Marco I never had any faith in Fulham getting results away from home at Premier League “cauldrons”. I was always certain that when stepping into fiery opposition territory, like Goodison, like Elland Road, the City Ground, Selhurst Park, that we would just fold. Our historically pretty style of football never seemed to count for much when a home crowd got on top of us, we just used to melt.
Silva has hardened our underbelly; we’re not just a “nice team” anymore, we do have a bit about us. We like a scrap, we like to silence a usually raucous stadium. We’ve incorporated some of the shithousery that we used to severely lack. However, it’s clearly not enough to do that for 85 minutes, especially when we’re so often involved in games where there’s only one goal in it.
We’re like the chubby kid who has been hitting the gym. We’ve gotten rid of the squishy midriff, but there’s some more press-ups to be done until we’ve got that steely six-pack.
