Craven Cottage Newsround

It’s likely that we’re going to see a couple more signings today, one of whom should be a direct replacement for Zat.   This being so, the team should line up in standard fashion this weekend:  Keller; Baird-New defender/Pearce-Bocanegra-Konchesky; Davies-Smertin-Davis; Dempsey; Kamara-Healy.  Is that a team to scare Spurs?  Is it a better team than we were putting out last year? 

And how good is this team?  I’ve said before that in a parallel universe we could be top of the league, but that’s probably excessively optimistic.  While we could have beaten Arsenal, that would have been a bit fortunate.  I can concentrate on Dempsey’s miss as evidence that we should have won, but Arsenal could point to the silly and freakish first minute goal and all kinds of other craziness in a counter-argument.   I think it’s reasonable to say that we made a decent fist of a difficult match.  And that football is a very random game.

The next game against Bolton was won without *that* much trouble.  It wasn’t particularly pretty but you wouldn’t expect it to be.  We got by because Smertin’s low drive flicked off a nearby heel and flew into the net, so luck was with us then.   Middlesbrough… well, until McBride’s freakish injury we were in absolute control. I’m not going to go through the subsequent bad luck again.  We all know what happened and it still makes me angry.  While we played badly against Villa in the second half, that was a combination of exceptionally brave and forthright play from Villa (4-2-4 is rare but wonderful), Chris Baird’s dismissal and the rest of our team wilting in the scorching sun (that’s how it looked anyway). 

So yes, football can be a very random game.  For average teams like us things are decided on hundreds of little turning points, and so far this year they’re mainly going against us (except the ones that are going for us! Lehmann and Smertin).  We as human beings tend not to like the idea that luck is so central to our lives, it makes us feel helpless and that our destiny is beyond our control.  But as we’re seeing, luck is everywhere this season.  These weird events are happening in ways that directly and severely hurt Fulham, but the laws of averages suggest that this has to change soon.   Things aren’t as bad as they seem.  And even if you don’t buy the luck thing, we’re not going to concede in the last minute of every game are we?

It can be argued that performances are just as important as points, and on this front we really are doing okay.  Excuse me if this is nothing new, but with all the negativity flying around I wanted to have another look at things.  And I think I was right: we are on the right lines.   The problem is that we’ve now got a dangerous Spurs side on the horizon, then a trip to a resurgent Wigan.  Decent performances in these games might earn us 2-3 points, but anything else and we could be firmly anchored to the bottom of the table.  And while a rational mind would surely say “don’t panic” and look at the longer-term prognosis (when the luck will even out), since when has rational thought applied to football?   The pressure is on.