Odds and ends

Roy on TV:

BBC video post match

Sky post match video (maybe a better interview)

He’s nice about Julio Arca’s tackle.   Real gent, is Roy.

Some comments:

(On Bullard)

This is not like a Michael Owen situation.  Jimmy has 18 months to go, the same as myself and 75 per cent of the squad.

Quite right.

Jimmy is doing a good job but a lot of players are doing a fantastic job in this team.   I and the rest of the players can feel a bit aggrieved that all the talk seems to be revolving around one man…  Danny Murphy has done a remarkable job in his quiet way. Jimmy has done his bit and I am the first to recognise and thank him for it but it is wrong to make this a one-man club.

Again, all true, and all worth saying.  Bullard did well, but Murphy was outstanding, Clint Dempsey had a stormer on the right, and Simon Davies was decent enough.  Zamora and Johnson were fantastic (they really are a very hard working pair) and the entire defence was again very, very good.    The media’s Bullard love-in is excellent for us if we want to drum up a sale, but otherwise an unwelcome distraction.

Incidentally, the latest FulTime magazine is great.  Andy Johnson speaks of how close he and Zamora are, and says how against Spurs Woodgate and King both said that they’d never had to run so much in a game.   Roy said something similar in his interviews, that Middlesbrough’s defenders will know they’ve had a game.    Zamora and Johnson are the squad’s unsung heroes at the moment, and I really do hope they grab the goals that their work deserves.

Here is Dickson Etuhu about to make his Fulham debut.  Congratulations, Dickson.

Clint Dempsey scored six goals in his centre-forward stint last year, a spell that lasted from August through to the end of December.   Nobody seemed too quick to give him any credit for this, despite his being used out of position in a bad team.   When we signed Johnson and Zamora I said that I’d be surprised if either matched Clint’s first half of the season haul, and now, with two games left in the year, it would appear that this guess will be proved correct.

Of course I’m not saying that Dempsey is a better forward than Johnson or Zamora – clearly this is not the case.  But I do hope that his recent run in the team has given people something to think about.   We have spent a lot of time praising him at CCN, probably to the point of annoying some readers, but when you look at his recent performances surely his value is now established.   A good argument could be made that without him we’d have been relegated in both of the last two seasons, and now here he is again, returning to the side at the start of a six match unbeaten run in which two goals have been conceded and ten points picked up.  No, that’s not all on Dempsey, but he’s done his bit.   That broad portfolio of skills is starting to turn into an array of genuinely useful talents, and he looks genuinely dangerous wide on the right now.   Long may it continue.

(Added to which, I’d be quite surprised if he hasn’t played more games for Fulham than anyone else in the current squad.)

Here he and Roy discuss yesterday’s game.