Craven Cottage Newsround

It has been noted that our manager has been getting a bit tetchy in interviews. In his defence, people are always asking him about this blasted last 10 minutes hoodoo, and I’m not quite sure what they expect him to say back. He comes up with a different angle on the phenomenon most weeks, but I wanted to know if the pressure is telling in other ways.

So here’s the interview after the Arsenal game.

And here’s the interview after the Blackburn game.

He might have been a little more composed at the start of the season, but it’s nothing major. One thing I would point out is that there are a lot of excuses in both, missed penalty decisions, reasons why we should have won but didn’t, some of which were down to the refereeing.

I don’t know about this. Is it his way of deflecting attention away from himself and his players? Is it a good idea to do that? Does it matter at all? It could be argued that what he says in interviews and what he says to his players is very different. In fact I’m almost certain it is.

Let’s go back to the Arsenal game. He spent the time with the interviewer blaming the referee for the penalty decisions, and mentioning a couple of good chances we had to put the game away. But at the time we had it on pretty good authority that he gave the team an almighty bollocking after that game.

He’s not going to criticise his players in public unless he feels there’s reason to do so. So against Arsenal the team was spared a public shaming (having competed well against a technically superior side), but after the Spurs game Antti Niemi was criticised in an interview. Right or wrong, it got the desired results: Niemi has been sensational since his recall.

I’m talking about this because every time we get one of these interviews people are jumping up and down on messageboards suggesting that our manager has lost the plot. Recently there was an interview in which Lawrie was toying with the idea of ending relegation. His point was that if we all wanted to play like Arsenal it’d take a bit of time, and it would be a huge risk and involve losing lots of games as the players adapted to a more artistic version of the game. He wasn’t literally proposing the end of relegation, but musing that this would be the only way to encourage teams to play risky football. With the game as it is the emphasis is on risk-avoidance for 90% of the division. This was clear enough to anyone who thought about it for a moment, but still some used the interview against him, as evidence that he talks nonsense, doesn’t know what he’s doing.

It’s getting ridiculous. What we have at the moment is a division divided neatly in two. There’s actually something like a 5 point gap between the top half and the bottom half. We’re top of the bottom half. This, for some reason, is making people angry (I’m over-simplifying of course). They’re also angry with the style of play (never mind that we’ve scored at least 5 goals that have been better than anything scored last year), angry at results (never mind that they’ve been alright, and that with luck they’d be much better), angry with the new signings (most of whom have been pretty good*), and yes, angry with the manager himself.

At some point you just have to wonder if people just like being angry. Football has issues at the moment, big issues, but Fulham are plodding along quite nicely, and should be alright for another year. I do wish he hadn’t spent that last interview talking about us not being thrashed yet though. It’s Man Utd away next…

* contrary to what people are saying, I believe the new players have been fairly useful. And those who haven’t shown us their best may very well do so in the future. My glass will be half-full for a while yet. Even Joe Kamara, about whom I’ve complained a bit, has hit the inside of a post (at Villa), had a good goal struck off (at Sunderland) and nearly won the London derby with Chelsea (and did he have one disallowed in the cup game with Bolton?).