Jim Dodge, from the excellent “Rain on the River” book.
I’ve had enough of a lot of things at the moment, mainly to do with work and the unavoidable ‘off switch’ that seems to accompany working a longish notice period, but there’s other stuff too. I’m going to tune out for a bit – ignore the message boards, ignore the news, just enjoy football for what it is, a fun diversion.
I drove my parents mad asking “why?” every five minutes when I was growing up; I’m driving myself mad now. My degree was in psychology: why do people think what they think? My job is market research: why do people think what they think? So you can see why I’m like I am. I have a million books aimed at finding out more about all sorts of things. To find out why.
I think I need to just let it all be. Things are what they are. Sometimes we’ll win, sometimes we’ll lose, some people are always going to love Jimmy Bullard even when his passes are more dangerous to the Barnes Wetlands centre than our opposition; some people will hate Seol Ki-Hyeon even if he scores a hat-trick against Chelsea then then wins Strictly Come Dancing having saved Dame Helen Mirren from a terrorist attack on the way to the BBC. Fine. I’m not going to try to understand anything. No, I’m just going to admire highly skilled athletes doing cool things with a football for a couple of weeks.
Clint Dempsey to ESPN.
When asked if he thought he’d get an opportunity soon, Dempsey replied, “No.”
“What keeps me sane is the national team to go to and play,” he said. “Right now I’m playing well for them, and I find confidence in that. Having two different teams to play for and being able to feel like you’re appreciated with one of them is always a good thing as a player.”
Well that doesn’t sound so good, does it? Bummer.
I think everyone knows I’m a big Dempsey fan. Just enjoy watching him, the way he plays, and after Adam’s work, well that’s just another reason to want him to do well. But it doesn’t sound like it’s happening.
A thoroughly depressing evening. Roy Hodgson set the tone with an uninspiring choice of starting line-up, and the Fulham players on the pitch followed up with an utterly lifeless performance. To say this game was dull would be an understatement – writing only a couple of hours after having left the stadium, the ‘events’ of the match have already merged into a blur of nothingness in your correspondent’s mind. I don’t think either keeper had a save to make for the first 88 minutes. At which point, suddenly, our defence (like the rest of us) fell asleep and Pascal Zuberbuhler found himself faced one-one-one by Burnley’s young substitute – the striker finding it the easiest thing in the world to round Zuberbuhler and slot the ball into the empty net. Game over, and another predictable ‘shock’ defeat to lower league opposition was complete.
Who takes the rap, then? The manager for making eight changes, massively disrupting a side that was playing some good football in previous weeks? Or the players who were selected and produced such a listless performance? For example, Adranik and Andreasen, two midfielders who presumably think themselves good enough and would have been desperate to stake their claim for a permanent place, were both disappointing in central midfield – the former tidy defensively but misplacing countless passes whilst the latter was simply anonymous. Konchesky was uncharacteristically lacklustre and Gera struggled as he had at Blackburn. Even the previously impressive Andrew Johnson made little impression, although he was the victim of poor service – the ball mostly hoofed up to him, either high in the air or at great speed, giving him little chance of being anything other than a minor nuisance to Burnley’s grateful central defenders.
There was one period of Fulham pressure for seven or eight minutes midway through the second half, when suddenly it looked as we had awoken from our slumber and might impose our Premiership class. The otherwise nervy Fredrik Stoor made a couple of promising bursts down the right and Clint Dempsey came as close as we ever would with a low shot from just outside the area. But the spell soon faded, and in truth the only players to leave the pitch with any credit were the industrious Dempsey and the centre-back pairing of Kallio and Baird. These two, in fairness, looked reasonably solid before their late aberration allowed the goal, and Kallio especially appears a more than capable back-up should one of our centre-halves get injured. Indeed, probably two of the most exciting Fulham moments of the match were a couple of mightily impressive last-ditch sliding tackles by the lanky Finn, both instances culminating in him rising majestically from the ground with the ball at his feet as the opposition forward lay bewildered nearby. Small crumbs.
The 300 or so away followers who foolishly made the journey north began the match in good voice (“We won here one time, we won here one tiiiime, in the nineteen-fifties…”) but were soon reduced to a near comatose state by the soporific spectacle on the pitch and ended the evening cold, bored and more than a little irked about what had occurred. It’s an argument to be had in more detail elsewhere, but surely the fans deserve better from Hodgson than the obviously second-string and unmotivated eleven he sent onto the field, especially having commented after the Leicester tie that the League Cup is ‘a very important competition … we will always try to send out our best team.’ Not so, it seems. And one thing’s for sure – this kind of depressing debacle will do nothing to help us beat West Ham on Saturday.
