Craven Cottage Newsround

Someone at www.bigsoccer.com (where I spent a lot of time this summer learning about how to get World Cup tickets!) was wondering what the view’s like from the Haynes Stand.   Actually he wondered this last year, but since I haven’t posted any pictures from games yet it spurred me into action.   Here are some from the Bolton and Sheff Utd games, taken with my mobile.  My girlfriend brought a proper camera to the Chelsea game so we should have better pics from that.  .  Anyway, here’s a sample of the view from K block:

Up close to the big man.

A small child stood on this bar in the second half.   Typically of us English, nobody asked him to move for some time, despite the fact that he was in the way of the damn goal!

This is Sheffield Utd’s wide defender David Unsworth.   He is a genuinely wide man.

For the Sheffield Utd game we lacked legroom.  The seats in the corner of row A were free though, so we moved forward.  From there we could happily have poured Coke onto an opposition head.   But we didn’t.

Today I’m home alone so have been watching Premiership football beamed in from Singapore.

First I saw Bolton and Liverpool throw up a farcical 2-0 home win. Bolton had so little of the ball that I don’t recall any of their players doing much at all, but that’s what Bolton do. I can’t see how it works, Liverpool played them off the park, but the scoreboard doesn’t lie.

Bolton got some help; the first goal came from a free-kick that should never have been given, the linesman judging (wrongly) that Reina had handled outside his box… while punting the ball upfield. This was wrong, he let go of the ball inside his box, the linesman reacted to Reina’s final position outside the box and a free-kick was given. The ball was rolled to Gary Speed whose left footed outside of the boot drive screamed low and hard into the Liverpool net.

Liverpool, and Alonso in particular, seemed to spend the whole game shooting just over or just wide, and in the end it all got a bit predictable. Just after half-time Ivan Campo arrived on the end of a right-wing cross and planted a header in off the underside of the bar. I always imagine Campo like a giant wheelie bin on the pitch. He’s the anti-Thierry Henry really. Henry is a player I associate with grace and movement, dynamism. Campo is a lumpen, craggy footballer, solid and strong. I can’t imagine him moving at all, except to spring towards crosses like he did today. This isn’t to belittle his effectiveness or laugh at his hair, just an observation on his style, such that it is. So yeah, 2-0.

Benitez has bought himself plenty of time with the European Cup win, but things do look like they’re getting a bit weird up there. Up front England’s hero Peter Crouch can’t jump over Welsh urchin Craig Bellamy into the first team, while the blonde bombshell that is Dirk Kuyt seems to have the manager’s unreserved backing for now… until things change. The Sissoko/Alonso pairing is great, but it means that Steve Gerrard (today a wide-left player again) gets messed around, while young Pennant on the right still flatters to deceive. I’m a fan of his, and I think he’ll come good, but at the moment the team looks dysfunctional.

Meanwhile, back in London, Chelsea and Aston Villa played out a willing 1-1 draw at Stamford Bridge. Chelsea looked better than they did against Fulham, Shevchenko looks like he’s finding his form, and Essien was again peerless in the middle of the pitch (and wherever else his thundering runs took him). But Martin O’Neill’s club are made of stern stuff these days, and with Ridgewell prominent at the back they took everything Chelsea could throw at them. The Villa front three looked lively and carved Chelsea up a few times with quick 1-2 triangles, exposing the lack of pace that the Champions have at the back. Late on Angel lamped a volley into the side netting when a goal was just about possible, and that would’ve given Villa 3 points that their approach almost deserved.

The goals came in the first half while I was on Tooting High St looking for Coriander seeds, but by all accounts the first half was as good as the second. Villa are compulsive viewing at the moment, and their manager deserves all the credit in the world for how things are going (so far).

If we wanted to take a ‘half empty’ approach we could mention that Fulham haven’t scored in 3 hours now.  And if we wanted to be really gloomy, if we take out the last few minutes of the Newcastle match, Fulham haven’t scored unaided from open play all season! 

This takes an excessively negative view, but it’s vital in how we look at the current team.   Scoring and not conceding are not mutually exclusive.   Remember Liverpool last year?   Peter Crouch couldn’t score for toffee, nobody else was either, but they were keeping clean sheets like a John Lewis storage depot.   Things changed though, Liverpoool found the scoring habit, and… didn’t keep a clean sheet for about six months.   England were the same at the World Cup, by playing with such fear and locking the door behind them, they gave themselves precious little chance of opening anything up at the other end.   It’s a negative way to play that signals a basic fear of the opponent.

In Fulham’s case this is justified.  This year the team has already played Man Utd, Newcastle and Spurs away, and Chelsea at home.   Only Bolton and Sheffield United have been games you’d hope for a win from, and both of those came on the back of the United thrashing.    One could justifiably suggest that if those three games were played now we’d get a lot more from them, but that’s not how it works.    But the point is that the way the season has been constructed, Fulham have had to play defensively, both because of a lack of confidence (from the Utd game), from tough opponents, and from injuries to important players.  

There have therefore been sacrifices.   The team has yet to show much in the way of attacking football, and that means that whoever of John, McBride or Helguson has been up front has been reduced to feeding of scraps, to use a popular phrase.   All have shown a willingness to run, chase, and make the best of the situation.  None have looked likely to score a goal.

This makes things difficult for us when we try to evaluate the team.  I’ve written about being pleased with the defence and worried about the attack, but the way the team has been set up may have led me to this view without properly evaluating things.    What it means is that short of bringing in a real game-breaking forward, most others put in the same position as John, McBride or Helguson would probably do little better.   So when Coleman thinks about bringing in players in the transfer window, he will have a lot of thinking to do.   In fact, the signing of Routledge suggests to me that he is thinking along the same lines as me, not blaming the forwards about the lack of punch, and trying to bring in a quicksilver attacking player who can change things without upsetting the current defensive steel that the team is showing.

The next step then might be to see either Boa Morte rehabilitated into usefulness, or the acquisition of another wide player with pace.   This would still allow Coleman to use Brown in the protecting role he seems to love, and keep Diop back there with him.  This defensive pairing would be counterbalanced by Routledge/other, at once giving the team attacking options and a really solid core, a kind of Eastern European counterattacking extravaganze, if you will.   It might well be the best way for this group to play.

Again, you have to love what Coleman is doing to the team given all the injury problems.   I’m really optimistic.

Good news on Routledge.  Brian Glanville, who has watched more football than any man alive (probably), seems to really rate our new player:

Last Saturday was something of a right winger’s day. It was heartening to see that gifted outside right, Wayne Routledge, largely mothballed since joining Tottenham from Palace, feeling his oats again at Newcastle for Fulham, where his crosses caused chaos in the suspect Newcastle defence – how long can Titus Bramble survive?

I agree, I think he looks terrific and can’t wait to see more.  Hats of to Coleman for bringing in another quality player.

Hurray! The kit is here, the kit is here!

I had hoped that the Airness fiasco would end with some break with Airness and a nicely put together Adidas effort, but it seems as if this is not to be the case. Well that’s ok, the main thing is that there will be a home kit for fans to wear, and better yet, according to the article it won’t be skin-tight in fit. I’m sort of happy about this, but equally I do like the idea of wearing what the players wear. Never mind.

So, to buy or not to buy? And if to buy, to buy with what on the back? My current shortlist, in order:

Queudrue

Brown

Pearce

This may change. Note Brown’s presence, a reward for his fine form and reinvigoration as a real midfield enforcer. He’s behind Smooth Franck though, a player whose ability on the ball is second to none.  He’s a joy to watch.

Speaking of Franck, the Fulham website has an interview with our man, in which he lets us know that the team has a good spirit, which is nice to hear. They do have the look of a team that gets along.

“To be fair, it’s a very friendly Club. I have had a great welcome from every player and everybody at the Club. The training sessions are good. A good atmosphere really helps a lot when settling down, and we’ve got that.”

A funny thing happened to me last night.  I was lying in the bath with the radio on, when who should I hear but John Motson.  I hadn’t expected this, but it was not unwelcome.  

The thing about this is that I can not stand Motson when he’s on TV.  I just find him irritating to the extreme.  He’s a nice man and I think I’d like to spend an hour in a pub with him on a winter afternoon (possibly watching a six nations match), but his TV commentary pushes the wrong buttons for me.   And here he was on radio and I loved it.   He was accompanied by the splendid Gavin Peacock, that rare ex-footballer who has a brain and can make jokes that aren’t wrapped up in three layers of smugness.  

I mention the latter because the BBC coverage is driving me bananas at the moment.  It has been getting worse for a while, but the World Cup represented a low-point that I don’t know that I’ll recover from.   Lineker has lost the eagerness and the “like-me” attitude that did indeed make me quite like him back when he took over from Desmond Lynam.   Shearer I don’t mind, but he was involved in too many of the laddish chuckles that dominated the BBC coverage for my liking.  The message was very much “we’re ex-footballers and we are all millionaires and we find each other really amusing and we don’t know jack about football but the alternative to us is Andy Townsend on ITV so you’re stuck aren’t you?”     And as for Ian Wright…

I fear that today’s poor mood is starting to show through in what I’m writing, so I’ll stop on this for now, but I was very pleased to have rediscovered Motty in this way.   He and Peacock made the Portsmouth v Bolton game sound like the most exciting game of the year last night, which is what you want from your radio broadcasts.  I remember listening to England v Republic of Ireland on a Weetabix branded portable radio back in 1984 or so, when Lineker and Trevor Steven got the goals.    Last night recaptured some of the excitement that the 8 year old me had felt that night, and that’s a really mad feeling.   Yay.

Nothing much has changed in my mind after a day of pondering: we fought well, missed the key chance, and were ultimately undone by a better team that had more tactical options available to it.   Our biggest problem was creating chances, and the inability of Mark Halsey to curb his tendency to award most 50/50 decisions to the champions.  

Chris Coleman was quite bitter about this after the match, citing two penalties that weren’t given.  I can see why they weren’t awarded, but for the most part Halsey was poor and not even-handed in his decision making.    Over the course of a game these decisions all mount up, and after a dozen or so 50/50 decisions had gone Chelsea’s way things understandably got a bit fraught.  It wasn’t that he was flagrantly biased, but the subtle accumulation of one-sided decisions is almost as bad - this sort of refereeing adds uneccessary bite to a game that is already full of tension, and if Michael Brown (or another like minded player) had gone overboard and made a rash challenge then Halsey would have had to shoulder some of the blame for the way he handled the game. 

Back to the players though.  They gave everything, which is all we ask in this country.  Looking back though, the lack of artistry in midfield does stand out somewhat, and Routledge excepted, there’s no creative influence in this team.   This will make it relatively easy for good teams to keep us quiet in the final third of the pitch, and underlines again how much we are going to miss Jimmy Bullard in the months ahead.  Now, when Bullard does return I think we’ll have a midfield to be reckoned with.   A fully fit Diop and a fully charged Brown will make life tricky for any team.  Routledge looks like a flyer, and Bullard, as we briefly saw, will be everywhere and do everything. It’s a great unit.    Note that there’s no mention of Boa Morte here, chiefly because his recent displays would not justify his inclusion.

At the back I think we’re about set.  Rosenior is improving with every game; Pearce, a rejuvenated Knight, Christenval and Quedreue have all played superbly in front of the excellent Niemi.   This team is almost where it needs to be.   As we’ve lamented before, there is a lack of penetration up front, but for us to be this near to putting together a fully-formed and very capable team is really encouraging. 

There was an air of resignation about things in the end, but for an hour we gave as good as we got.  A Diop header in the second half flashed wide, and that changed everything.  If he’d scored, and it looked as if he should have, Fulham would have taken a 1-0 lead.  He didn’t, and shortly afterwards Rosenior stumbled in his own box trying to keep up with the flighty Mikel.  Ball and hand met, and Chelsea had a penalty.  Lampard held his nerve and crashed the ball past Niemi, and that was about that.

Until then Fulham had battled gamely.  Michael Brown, who has been criticised on these pages, was absolutely immense.  He flew about the pitch with controlled fury, nicking balls from Lampard all game long, and giving Makalele plenty to think about.  Moritz Volz wasn’t far behind him, and these two look like keepers to me.   Alongside them Bocanegra found it hard to keep up, and Diop looked at about 75%.  Not enough for a game like this, although CC had little choice.  Wayne Routledge impressed me with his pace, skill and balance, and if the end product wasn’t always there, he gave both full-backs plenty to worry about.   He almost scored in the first half, but seemed to disappear as the game went on.

The other thing to note is that the referee gave us absolutely nothing, and Chelsea seemed to realise this early on, falling for little and getting free kicks for everything.   Brown and Volz were whistled several times for immaculate if energetic tackles, and really there’s no excuse for that sort of refereeing at this level.    

There were other good performances: Niemi made some good saves, and had no chance with the goals.  Zat Knight and Ian Pearce were comfortable enough, and Frank and Liam at full-back both gave everything.  Frank’s free-kicks and general play were excellent, and until the penalty incident Liam had played as well as I’ve seen him play.  It all looked pretty good.

The trouble, of course, is goals, and the Fulham players’ inability to get them.   Routledge had one chance, Diop another, but there was little else to be had.  The team is in serious need of a goalscorer.

Things are looking good overall, the team made Chelsea look pretty ordinary for quite a while.  Shevchenko and Drogba got little joy from the Fulham defence, and Lampard hardly got a sniff until his goals. 

But that’s what Chelsea do, and they’ll be happy with a 2-0 win in our back yard.   So disappointing, but the signs are still good.  We should win our next two home games (Charlton and Wigan) and should be a top 10 team at Christmas, at which point Coleman might be able to buy a forward.

It’s nearly time, and I’m getting excited. 

Chelsea have stumbled into this season.  They have two good left-backs, no clear idea of who’s at right-back (still), and have lost William Gallas’s considerable ability to Arsenal.   They have a midfield that has to fit the Wall of Makalele, Michael Ballack (susp. tomorrow), Michael Essien and Frank Lampard into it, and that’s before we start thinking about wingers.  And up front Shevchenko looks for all the world like a player who doesn’t know what he’s got himself into.  He is good, we know that, but he’s not showing it yet.   With him, Didier Drogba is firing like the massively expensive forward he was supposed to be when they bought him.   He’s scary, no two ways about it.

On the other side, Fulham are shorn of half a squad and will have to be at their battling best to get something from the game.   Lord knows where a goal might come from, but maybe Wayne Routledge can come up with something.  The team will presumably be something like that which got a good point away to Spurs, and let’s be honest, a similar result and a similar game would be ok tomorrow.  

Chelsea may well try to bring some width back into their game.  Ballack is suspended, and if there’s one thing that would play into Fulham’s favour it’d be a super-crowded midfield scrum-down.  Volz and Brown, as well as Diop (if fit) can spoil with the best of them.  Chelsea’s best chance is to go with wingers and stretch the makeshift Fulham side to the limit. 

It’ll be the first time I’ve seen Frank Lampard since 1993, when my school met his at football.  As we travelled down from Bedford to East London that day our coach, Doc Richards, told us about this boy Lampard, and how we’d have to pay serious attention to him or we’d be torn to bits.   Every few games this would happen, Doc would get wind of some winger who Watford or Luton or Norwich had had in, and we’d play them and generally not be able to tell which player he’d meant and after a while I began to take less and less notice of the warnings. 

But Lampard was to be different; he was to sign on with West Ham shortly after this game, which would be his last for Brentwood school.    Excitingly too, he would be playing up front, and I’d be marking him.  “Get in early and hard, Rich,” said the Doc, “let him know you’re there” (a generation of football coaches brought up in the 70s saw this as the best way to deal with good players).   Alright, I thought, no problems. 

We lined up and this Lampard lad was very small.   He was about 5′5′ I suppose, and very lightweight in build.   He didn’t look remotely intimidating and I relaxed a little.  And I did get him early, a ball played into his feet straight from the off, so I got my knee into the back of his leg.  It wasn’t hard, but it got them a free kick.  After that I could relax, having done what my coach asked (I was too nice a footballer really, always apologising after making bad tackles, and I didn’t like that side of the game).  After a while you could tell Lampard was good.  He was what people in Bristol call a “shaper”, in that he did simple things but looked good doing them, lots of tidy lay-offs and good control, but honestly he wasn’t hurting us too much, and we were matching our opponents pretty well.   I certainly don’t remember Lampard getting much of a sight of goal.

We got to half-time at 0-0.   We came out and he’d dropped back into midfield, a sort of Sheringham role after being a spear-head for the first-half.   A few minutes had passed and the stalemate continued.  We built a rare attack down the right, and a whipped cross saw our centre-midfielder crack a half-volley against the Brentwood post from six yards out.  That would’ve been 1-0, and a huge upset if such a thing is possible in schoolboy football.  I don’t know if that near-miss knocked the stuffing out of us, but we were 1-0 down soon after.  Then another attack saw the ball bobble to the edge of the box.  Our defence was all over the place, Lampard avoided two desperate tackles with scary ease, then coolly slipped in a second goal.  It was the one thing he did all game that showed why he and not some of the other good players on the pitch that day was going to the big time.   They added another and we walked off gallant 3-0 losers.  I’d marked Frank Lampard, and done it well, probably the one thing I’ll really remember about playing football as a lad.

Anyway, forgive me for that self-indulgence.   Here’s a to a good game tomorrow, here’s to sensible supporters, and here’s to some points!

“Mrs Charlton was informative about the way professional football clubs hunt for young players. She said that once it was known that Manchester Utd had made contact other clubs had representatives calling at the house almost daily. She said: ‘They were offering us the world. One fellow offered us £800. Another said he’d double whatever was the highest offer we’d had. He didn’t even ask what it was. There was another fellow in the front room who said he had £550 in his briefcase, and we could have it there and then.’

All these inducements were illegal, but the practice was widespread.”

Arther Hopcraft, The Football Man, 1968. Chapter discussing Bobby Charlton’s entry into professional football.

So the BBC has learned that young players are illegally approached…

Well… Panorama nearly lifted the lid on corruption. It showed that there are some greedy people out there, that there are a lot of people wanting a piece of the rich football pie, but didn’t get hard evidence on anyone.

Knut Auf Dem Berge, a fashionably bald German coach who worked in England and was sick of the corruption, agreed to go undercover for Panorama. He was the front-man for a new agency that proposed to look after managers in exchange for preferential treatment in transfer dealings. As one agent put it, give the manager £100,000, make £500,000 on the deal.

Knut filmed Teni Yerima, a licensed agent, and Yerima almost got himself filmed taking a bung. But the Mike Newell story broke at the same time, and Yerima and the un-named manager got nervous. The deal was off.

Next was Charles Collymore and his henchman. Collymore said that 6-8 managers would take bungs, and that this was easily done through the slipping of cash and through off-shore bank accounts. Of all the agents shown Collymore smelled the worst, greedy to the bone. He mentioned Sam Allardyce as well.

We then met Peter Harrison, who Panorama fitted up as the bad guy in all this. Harrison was extremely sly and would frequently try to steer Knut away from direct monetary discussions. He alluded to past misdemeanors, but again, there was nothing direct to go on camera. He suggested that four or five managers would be interested. Sam Allardyce was named again, but this time with a twist: Allardyce has a lot of money now, but if it were to be paid to his son, Craig, that would have the same effect.

This led us to the saddest part of the programme. Allardyce’s son Craig, clearly not the sharpest tool in the box, and dazzled by the dollar signs he saw in Knut. Craig Allardyce was happy to talk up his own importance on certain Bolton deals, was happy to acknowledge his father’s knowledge of this involvement, and happy to admit that sometimes money found its way into the hands of unlicensed agents, which is illegal. As things progressed though, Allardyce junior was gradually exposed as a wannabe, entirely reliant on his father for (lots of) money, and not the big player he wanted to be. When confronted about the tapings, Craig said that he had wanted to seem impressive in front of Knut’s agency. This seems entirely plausible.

We also saw Chelsea (no?!) and Liverpool offering to make an illegal payment for Middlesbrough’s Nathan Porritt, 15 years old and being touted on the sly, and Harry Redknapp being offered a trip to the World Cup.

“What are you doing for the World Cup?” asked Peter Harrison.
“Nothing, probably” said Harry, sheepishly, as if admitting that he didn’t have anyone to go to the school disco with.

Knut caught Kevin Bond, Redknapp’s coach, in his net too. Nearly anyway, mentioning money and not being turned down, but soon Harrison had caught wind of this too, and no more was heard.

What does it all mean?

There are greedy people in football. Managers will try to get sly money where they can. If they do do it, and Sam Allardyce’s reputation can hardly have been enhanced by this programme, they are very careful about it, as you might expect. But managers have lots of money. Chief Scouts and coaches were mentioned, and I believe these people get incentives too. Kevin Bond seemed like a decent man. He probably lives comfortably, but probably still has a mortgage to pay, and if he could pick up £30,000 he would be tempted. As would many others in his position.

Agents are the greediest of these greedy people. Sure they are. They get money for not much. If agents were removed the game would work itself out, and wouldn’t lose these vast sums of money. I imagine there are some good agents, some scummy agents, and some helpless fools like Craig Allardyce who don’t appear to be of much use to anyone.

Footballers are touted around by agents, and not necessarily with their club’s permission. Well, sure, we all suspected this anyway. Ashley Cole’s situation looks worse after this, lending incredulity to his claims that the Chelsea meeting last year was a coincidence. I feel sorry for Nathan Porritt, who at 15 should be allowed to get on with his football at a club that is known for developing young talent, but again, are we surprised by the knowledge that talented youngsters are valued by ambitious teams to the extent that they will make iffy payments to get them? Not really.

We got an interesting programme, we got some names and we didn’t get some names. Harry Redknapp has nothing much to worry about on this evidence (in that he might well be guilty, but he’s kept his nose clean when it matters), Sam Allardyce will be somewhat concerned, and whoever the 5-6 others are, well, we just don’t know.

It’s a messed up world, football, but I still enjoy what happens on the pitch and that’s what matters to me.

“The young footballer today, of course, faces many more counter-attractions than his father, and infinitely more than his grandfather, while there is more money in his pocket, too.  The cinema has been one of the worst enemies of football, and television will be less helpful still, while the constant building on open sites has deprived young players of many an improvised football pitch”

From Brian Glanville, Soccer Nemesis, 1955

The more you learn about the past, the more you realise that with the odd exception, things haven’t really changed at all.   This from Glanville’s excellent book about how insular England have been overtaken by more cerebral foreigners on the football field… which is obviously still relevant today too.

Owen Hargreaves is injured, which is really disappointing.  He’s been man of the match for England’s last 5 games or something silly, and he won’t easily be replaced.   The press are suggesting Carrick will come in, but I hope not.  Where this idea of Carrick as a holding midfielder came from I’m not sure.  He does play deep, and plays pretty passes from deep, but he does not tackle.  Ever.  Against Ecuador in the World Cup, before the BBC’s joking buffoons had deigned to notice Hargreaves, Carrick was getting all kinds of silly praise.  Well in that game he didn’t make a single tackle.   Hargreaves made 14 or something against Sweden in the game before, and god knows how many in his one-man battle with Portugal.   And that is what a holding midfielder is for, to spoil opposition attacks and restart them simply.   Paul Ince did it, even good old David Batty did it, and Hargreaves has been outstanding at it in recent times.  Carrick simply doesn’t play this way, and I hope he doesn’t get the chance in an England shirt.   We’ll be as porous as a woollen jumper.  

This isn’t to say that Carrick’s not a good footballer, of course he is, more that I personally don’t believe he is well suited for that role.  Alec Ferguson must partially agree or he wouldn’t have gone for Hargreaves in the transfer window.   The player I would like to see picked is Scott Parker, who plays further up the field for Newcastle but who has the complete game needed for this position.  In fact, I’d play Parker instead of Lampard too, but that’s another story (feel free to add your own views to the comments below, incidentally!).

Michael Brown is of course nowhere near this level, but distinguished himself playing in the holding role at the weekend.   I’ve been quick enough to criticise him before, so will equally quickly praise him when he is contributing.   He was everywhere against Spurs and seemed to really relish being the senior man in the midfield (Boa excepted, but he hardly counts these days).   The differences between Hargreaves and Brown are not small, of course, but the main thing to notice with the Bayern player is how careful he is in possession.   He seldom misplaces a pass, going through entire games recently with only one or two going astray, despite getting an awful lot of the ball.   Brown is neither as involved nor as accurate, but now he’s in his natural position it’ll be really interesting to see how he progresses.   He has Mr Lampard and friends to deal with next weekend, which will be great to see.   I can’t wait to see Volz getting stuck into the Chelsea midfield either.

In the interests of prettying things up, here’s the latest from the Slavia Prague website front page.  I tell ya, if Fulham want to jazz things up this is the way to go.  Does anyone buy corporate sponsorship after accidentally noticing it plastered all over the team’s website anyway?  

You might have seen this before the World Cup, but always nice to remind ourselves of Fulham players doing well.

The Times have a column called The Fink Tank, in which some people who study the game statistically for a living talk about things that interest them. I don’t know that football can really be analysed like they say it can, but still, it’s always interesting to read another perspective. Anyway, the reason I’m writing this is that Ian Pearce was rated the best centre-back in the country last season and was put into their suggested England World Cup squad. He played very well today so I thought I’d stick this up as a tribute!

Thanks to the miracles of modern technology, White Hart Lane came to a spare room in Tooting this afternoon. Here at CCN we sat back with a jar of pickled onions and a glass of white wine, and enjoyed the ripsnorting game.

Spurs had their moments, but the Fulham boys gave it everything. Niemi made a few telling saves, the back four played with guts and (a few clumsy clearances aside) some ability. The patchwork midfield did its best, with Brown pulling the strings and showing that he can be an effective midfielder at this level after all. Around him Volz played like a Jack Russell biting the postman’s trouser leg, and Bocanegra, although quiet, was effective in his spoiling role.

That leaves Boa Morte and the forwards. Boa had more good moments in this match than in any of the other games combined, but still looks like something’s bothering him. He popped up all over the field, and one back heel in the inside right channel set Liam Rosenior away to cross (reasonably well, which is rare for Liam) from a very dangerous spot, but it was all too sporadic and this isn’t the sort of display you’d want from your captain. In the end he went off with a bruised cheek (?), the result of a collision incurred while heading of his own goal-line, a key contribution that earned his team a point.

Up front there was really nothing going on again, with balls fired at McBride’s head indiscriminately. Presumably he’s meant to jump ten feet into the air, stop the ball dead with his forhead, control the ball as it drops then volley it into the top corner. It’s hard to be too critical in what was after all a blood and guts away dig, but McBride must get frustrated with the service he gets up there. He has Collins John for support, and for a part of the patch that meant something, but before long John had faded into his usual irrelevance and a goal seemed more likely to come from Moritz Volz, which is pretty damning.

Anyway, a great away point and some real fight shown. The Volz-Brown-Bocanegra-Boa Morte midfield wouldn’t be anyone’s idea of a good plan, but it worked for this game. I’d like to see more of Volz in this role, and certainly Brown proved me wrong with a combative but intelligent game. Playing in his natural position has made a difference. The team has started well, and despite some awful luck with injuries is still looking good. With Chelsea stuttering along next week’s derby promises to be tight. They won’t be relishing it, but Coleman’s boys will be feeling quietly confident. Bring it on.