AFJ’s somewhat excellent day out
On Friday, regular CCN reader and commenter, AFJ, informed us that he had won tickets to the game along with a few other goodies and the chance to go out on the field at the Cottage during half time, and win an LG washing machine.
I asked AFJ to fill me in on the experience and he did so. Quite well actually. So here’s his story.
In the Times again
My latest Fanzine Fanzone bit: Of mother-in-laws and squirrels: peering into the abyss.
The last thing we needed was to have Manchester United visit us in our current state. I suppose it’s the football equivalent of having your mother-in-law pay you a surprise visit at 830am on a Sunday morning, ostensibly to ‘tidy the flat’. You’re hung over, grumpy, and smell strange. You don’t need it.
Or not, I don’t know. But Fulham could have done without visitors like this. We’re having a bad time playing against the league’s also-rans, United’s players were just too much. Consider the goals we conceded:
An Owen Hargreaves free-kick
A Ji-Sung Park header (thumping, towering… how?)
A Simon Davies own goal following a John O’Shea ‘raid’
It’s enough to make you want to jack all this in.
Whatever our midfield tried, Hargreaves had already thought of it and was there to block, intercept, whatever. Scholes was also several thought processes ahead of our players, and made this known on numerous occasions when his passing was just too good. The best was a quick free-kick inside the United half: Scholes looked up and flipped it 40 yards into Saha’s stride. The ex-Fulham man was kind and screwed his shot high and wide, but that pass! Wow. Our best work on Nani was when Paul Konchesky shoved the little urchin into the metal advertising hordings. We couldn’t deal with him by conventional means. Thank god they gave Ronaldo and Rooney the day off.
The strangest thing was watching United sit back for the last twenty minutes. Fulham manfully tried to weave intricate passing movements through this mass of red, but predictably got nowhere. It was superficially exciting, and allowed us to think that we’d ‘had a go’, but in the real world United could have woken up and gone looking for more goals at any moment. But they have Lyon to play in the week and so wanted to rest.
Where now then for Fulham? Many of us are advocating a ’shit or bust’ approach to the remaining games. We have tried to play the right way, to keep things tight, but this invariably means that any one incident can decide things, and Fulham being Fulham, that incident will more than likely be in our opponents’ favour. It is not hard to see us losing to Blackburn by 1-0, the goal coming via a deflection off a trespassing squirrel. It’s been that sort of season. No, we must go for it, select as many forwards as we can and try to confuse teams into 5-4 defeats. Nothing else has worked.
If not, well, we might win some games next season.
Up is black, down is white
Who knows what’s going on. We could qualify for Europe, it seems. What a mad, mad world.
Fulham could qualify for Europe even if they are relegated. England will obtain an extra Uefa Cup place if they remain top of Uefa’s Fair Play League. Fulham would claim it because of their disciplinary record.
