Jamie’s report from Burnley: Burnley 1-0 Fulham

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.