I’ve caught up. Apologies for lack of content here lately, but I’ve been hard at work on the day job and stuffing, addressing and posting Fulham Review envelopes in the evenings. And we’ve finally caught up. All orders are in envelopes and either in the post or about to be.
If you haven’t got one yet, please think about ordering now… the more we sell the more chance there is of breaking even and the more chance of doing all this again. Cheers!
Close but no cigar.
The US gave it everything against a talented Brazil side and almost walked away with the glory, but a devastating second half saw Brazil to a 3-2 win. Our boy Clint had a decent game, scoring again to make it three for the tournament and securing him third place in the individual player awards. He was in tears as he picked up his bronze ball. Still, he can be proud of his and his teammates’ performances. Just shows what an amazing, unpredictable game football is, eh?
Here’s friend of CCN Bruce DuNord and the crew watching the game.
U.S. midfielder and Golden Ball Winner Clint Dempsey
On the match:
“Everything doesn’t always work out how you want it to, but no matter what I’m proud of what these guys accomplished and it was great to be a part of it.”On how they shut down Brazil in the first half:
“We picked our moments of when to get forward, did a good job of hitting them on the counter with Landon’s goal. Second half we still had some good chances, but they were the better team.”On the goal he scored in the tenth minute:
“Spector hit a good ball in, I just wanted to get it towards goal and try to hit it to the far post, and lucky enough it trickled in.”On the performance of the team:
“I’m proud of this team, proud of the effort everyone put in. Nobody can take away what we accomplished. I thought we played well today and gave them a tough fight, would have been nice if we could have kept the lead but they were the better team and had more chances, and eventually you knew a goal would come.”
and:
“You know we were out of it in the Egypt game and showed a lot of character to come back.
“We got a result against them and a result against Spain and in the first half here we thought we’d get a result in the final.
“But that’s what people come to see and watch, it was exciting.”
Too right.
This adds Dempsey and Kamara to the chart. Good discussion below for those who missed it.
Why?
This ad’s at either end of my commute now. Here’s the fish and chip shop, here’s the big soulless grey walls, here’s some stairs… if you’ve ever gone into a warehouse or a grain silo then surely this tour will be nothing new.
Here. The Johnny Haynes Stand being built on?
I wonder what they’re doing.
Thanks for all the pre-orders. I’ve cleaned out every pound shop in Tooting buying jiffy bags to post them in.
There was a hiccup at the printer’s this week so the books will either arrive with me tomorrow, in which case I’ll post them Saturday, or Monday, in which case they’ll go on Monday.
Thanks for your patience, and if you haven’t ordered yet, please do! There’s a load of good stuff in there (I’ll do a proper spiel next week) and at £5 it’s top value.
http://www.godsfoot.com to order.
Last seasons’s Great Escape book is now sold out, but there are plenty of 06/07 books remaining.
cheers
Rich
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(hmmm. Someone’s scoring important goals in high profile matches… quieten down there, Clint)
I am, I know, something of a broken record on this subject, but I’ve found more proof so bear with me.
It has been my contention that Bobby Zamora, while not playing as well as we might hope, has not been as bad as people say. He has played in a team that does not emphasise attacking play, does not commit numbers to attack, which makes it easier for defenders to close down chances.
People don’t seem to accept this, so perhaps the following graph will help:
These are the percentage of shots on target for the Fulham players who have played for the last four years in England and shot a bit. Here are the raw numbers, for completeness:
| Zamora | Johnson | Gera | Davies | Murphy | |
| 05/06 | 60% | 54% | 41% | 63% | 38% |
| 06/07 | 47% | 68% | 43% | 46% | 83% |
| 07/08 | 45% | 77% | 53% | 54% | 60% |
| 08/09 | 27% | 40% | 27% | 24% | 14% |
How about that then? Every single one of them lost their shooting mojo this year, often quite considerably. I concede that some will simply blame this on Zamora (!) but if this isn’t a clear pattern I don’t know what is. So I repeat, this is a very hard team to play up front in. Unless you believe that all five of them just got bad at shooting just like that. And if you don’t believe that and you still want to blame Zamora for being terrible you have to make exceptions for the four other players but not him, and I don’t think you can do that. So… what do you think? Convinced anyone?
Still nothing tangible to talk about transfer-wise, so here are the 2007-08 arrest figures for Premier League clubs:
Weren’t we well behaved? There is some overlap. While no Spurs fans were arrested for violent disorder, four did throw missiles. Most racists: Spurs and Chelsea. Most offensive weapons: Chelsea and Arsenal. Strangely Manchester United dominated the alcohol league table. Birmingham were top of the non-missile violence category. And so on. Fulham? Did bugger all wrong really. No one dislikes us, we are nice.
Pakistan are victorious! And all Pakistan fans’ cars seem to have working horns. Tooting is ablaze with noise.
I used to think 20-20 was an abomination. I was very wrong. What a great game they’ve come up with. (Of course, it’s exactly the game many of us played every summer Wednesday while growing up, but it’s nice to see the old midweek slogs being played by experts. Great fun.)
Just throwing this up for consideration.
Clearly baseball and football are very different sports, but I was curious about the rate at which athleticism might decline. So yes, footballers require very different skills, but the human body is the human body and you can only do so much to slow things down. To whit:
This is by a professional baseball analyst called MGL, whose work I’ve followed (if not entirely understood). It was instructive that for a long time he was ahead of the game of baseball – he really did know more about aspects of the game than those ‘inside’ the game – but eventually he was hired by the St Louis Cardinals. He’s not infallible but he is very clever. Anyway, the above looks at a few things over time.
GDP is grounded into a double play. This happens with a man on first base and a batter hitting the ball on the floor. It effectively becomes a race down the line, so raw speed is everything here. Hitters might get smarter about avoiding double plays with age, which is perhaps why there’s no dropoff after 22-23. It’s clear that speed as it’s measured here is maintained through the mid twenties and drops off considerably at 29/30. I see no reason why this should be different for footballers.
UZR is a fielding measure. This is a decent proxy for a footballer too because now it’s not just about raw speed, but about positioning and even thinking. In this case the decline is at about 32, at which point the player will lack the basic athleticism required of his role.
SB/CS is interesting too. A player tries to steal a base when they’re on first. This is about speed, but again, that won’t do it. You need deception, smarts, and an ability to read the game around you. So the Stolen Base to CAught Stealing ratio is a measure of how successful they are at pilfering bases. You can see players getting better with age as they get more used to the game, then again things go awry at 32.
SLWTs is an overall rating for everything a player does, and here we see a peak at 26 or so and a decline past 30. This fits with football too.
Through all of this we must consider the sample, so the results could be more dramatic than they look. Only those players with the skills to keep playing are in the game at 32, so by definition you have a lot of 30-31 year olds who have dropped out of the test group because they’re not up to it anymore.
What does this prove for football? Not a lot, but as I say, I think the proxies for athletic ability are relevant. It suggests a red flag for players reaching their 31-32 year old seasons (we don’t have too many of those) and reinforces Roy’s apparant interest in players who are in the mid to late twenties, by which their athleticism is still okay and their ‘mental’ approach is probably about where it ought to be too. Again, this is not a new idea, but I liked the quantification. (I should probably caveat this by saying that baseball players mainly train for strength and endurance so perhaps footballer-specific training regimes could extend peak years).
‘The toilets at a local police station have been stolen. Police say they have nothing to go on.’
(Ronnie Barker)
It’s a bit like this for Fulham fans isn’t it? In the past there were leaks here and there, and if the press got hold of a story there was reason to think they might know something. Now? Well we really don’t get much do we? The newspapers like to recycle stories from the January transfer window, or sometimes from before that, but rarely do we hear anything concrete.
I still think the Gary O’Neil (with potential for Adam Johnson too) move will happen, but as we’ve seen with Stephen Kelly, it’s likely that any moves we do make will be a surprise to everyone.
Agents can, of course, complicate things. Paul Scharner’s agent is being loud about our interest, but notes that a move to Hamburg is still a possibility. To me that says “Fulham asked but really we want Hamburg, so I shall attempt to drum up interest by the usual means”.
Scharner might be an alright player, but where would he play? He can play in defence and midfield, but something tells me Roy’s not a big fan the old Chris Coleman Square Peg Theory of Team Selection and would prefer specialists to generalists if at all possible. You can hardly see 6′3′ Scharner playing anywhere but centre-back or in Dickson’s role, and in either case he would be a spare part/alternative, which would be fine for us but not what he wants and probably not worth spending money on. So I’m suspicious of this one.
UPDATE: IGNORE ALL THIS: RAY LEWINGTON’S POSTING ON TiFF:
scharner – well up on the hit list,, plays anywhere , good defender , if either c/h get injured, kelly and scharner ? read pants and dickson african nations , europa cup, injuries etc. RH rates scharner big time
So there we have it. He has another post saying “hence signing Kelly and Scharner” which implies that this is what we’re doing. Cool.
Otherwise the rumours have been few and far between. It’s encouraging, I suppose, that there are few stories about players leaving the club. This makes sense in that Fulham is one of the game’s hot tickets at the moment, a good club on the up, but still you’d expect a little more sniffing around. Perhaps it’s that team ethos again: people realise that this team is stronger than the sum of its parts, so dragging one of these parts elsewhere might not be the best idea.
So there we are. Things will surely move along as we hit July, but in the meantime we may sit back and enjoy the fact that we still have a good team, a team that should get better as well.
Thanks for all the Fulham Review interest. We’ve got over 100 pre-orders so far, which is tremendous news and (if sales continue) means that we should be able to break even, which is all we ask really. You can, of course, still order at www.godsfoot.com. (Last year’s book is now sold out and won’t be reprinted. So there you go, a collector’s edition or something.)
b+w_geezer has sent a Fulham Finances update through. Things really may be looking up for the club:
I never planned to update my efforts of two years ago on Fulham’s finances. However, David Conn did it all in the Guardian on 3 June 09. His article is well worth studying in full, but here are some highlights concerning FFC and selected clubs in our ballpark.
All these figures, in millions of pounds, relate to Season 2007-8. Afterwards I extrapolate to the one just ended.
TURNOVER
114.7 Tottenham
76.0 Everton
75.6 Aston Villa
59.1 Bolton (includes 8.7 from hotel)
56.4 Blackburn
53.7 Fulham
43.0 Wigan (Why so much lower than FFC?)
TV/BROADCASTING (incl. 0.75m per final place)
46.6 Everton
46.0 Aston Villa
41.2 Blackburn
40.3 Tottenham
34.2 Bolton
34.0 Fulham (finished 17th)
[Wigan unspecified]
GATE AND MATCHDAY
28.6 Tottenham (plus estimated >18m from corporate hospitality)
20.5 Everton (seems to include corporate hospitality)
18.5 Aston Villa (seems to include corporate hospitality)
9.6 Fulham (seems to include corporate hospitality)
6.8 Bolton (plus 2.4 from corporate hospitality)
6.2 Blackburn (plus unknown amount from corporate hospitality)
[Wigan unspecified]
TOTAL WAGE BILL
50.4 Aston Villa (67% of turnover)
44.5 Everton (59% of turnover)
39.7 Blackburn (70% of turnover)
39.3 Fulham (73% of turnover)
39.0 Bolton (66% of turnover)
38.4 Wigan (89% of turnover)
INTEREST PAYABLE
5.8 Aston Villa
3.9 Everton
3.0 Bolton
1.8 Fulham
1.7 Wigan
1.5 Blackburn
PROFIT/LOSS BEFORE TAX
+3.2 Fulham
+3.0 Blackburn
0 Everton (26k profit to be precise)
-8.4 Bolton
-7.6 Aston Villa
-11.2 Wigan
Notes:
Almost everything taken or inferred from David Conn at:
www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/jun/03/english-premier-league-debt
Additional info: Spurs’ sponsorship deal with Mansion is for a minimum 34m over 4 years. So if (per Conn) `Sponsorship and corporate hospitality’ totalled £27.8m for the season, hospitality would have been >18m. (Compare Everton…)
Extrapolation:
If these were the figures from Fulham’s great escape season, what can be expected from our best-ever one?
Our 7th place, plus FA Cup run will have added >8m to TV/broadcasting income. With some extra matchday income too, turnover ought to be >62m.
Wages bill? With a less bloated squad, there’s a chance it’ll have returned to more like the 35.2m of season 2006/7. The officially `healthy’ ratio of 60% of turnover would be achieved at around 37m.
If everything else is in line with Conn’s reports above, then pre-tax profits from our best-ever season will exceed 10m and may approach 15m.
…..But, so far as one can tell, none of this includes transfer fees paid/received.
It’s finally done!
To use my own explanation from FriendsofFulham.com last night:
For those of you new to the book, we have a match report from every game and a load of essays from fans. This year’s book has 112 pages, up from 96 last year and 80some the year before that. Contents are:
- Loads of match reports (we had someone [usually me or JamieR] at just about every game) featuring teams, attendance, etc.
- Chopper’’s Departing Heroes, a terrific annual feature where he reviews the careers of all players leaving the club
- American journalist Adam Spangler’s 17 page special on Clint Dempsey. Adam spent a couple of days with Clint a while back and wrote up his story. Amazing stuff.
- A few pages of stats from Colin at Championship at Best – cutting edge stuff, this
- The Times Top 50 Fulham Players feature I did earlier in the year
- Various other essays from Dan Crawford, Rob Griffin and myself
- And a few of Ormondroyd’s pics!
Last year’s book (also available from http://www.godsfoot.com) was much the same but detailed the Sanchez/Hodgson/Great Escape season (we’ve less than ten of this book left I fear that we may have sold out…).
The year before that was the Coleman/Sanchez/Dempsey season and we’ve a fair few of those!
All of them are a fiver, which is mad value considering the work that’s gone into them (oh, the hours…) and (we hope) the quality you’ll find within. We got amazing feedback after both of the first two books so hopefully the third will be just as well received. (We’ll happily post to the US or anywhere in the world.)
Some comments I have lifted from various sites already:
Will defiantly be buying, loved last years one. — A.L
Cheers for the heads-up. As Rich says, a fiver is insane VFM. Thanks to all involved in anticipation (NT) — The Doctor
looking forward to this years one – cracking read (NT) — NicW2
Loved last year’s, so this one should be a cracker. — Mike H
This is MUST reading. I’ll be ordering mine soon! — HatterDon
I got the one from the “great escape” season (didn’t know they existed before then) – its a GREAT read! — Burt
I wouldn’t lie to you, it’s a really good book (I finally believe this!) so if you want to buy one, please go to www.godsfoot.com and follow your nose.
One final thing: I’m a terrible salesman, so the more copies I can sell online the better. Word of mouth is vital on this, so please do spread the word and tell people if you like it. It makes a huge difference.
Thanks!
Fixtures. It’s one of those football words that really adds to the richness of the game. I remember when I was about nine and our Cub Scouts pack joined a league. We couldn’t believe it. A league! With fixtures and a league table and everything! It was like real football. I remember after a few games I came home and said to mum that if anything our league seemed a bit faster than the professional game. We didn’t have many fouls or throw ins, so the action could go on uninterrupted for ages, I reasoned. Mum gently suggested that the professional game was also quite fast. But that didn’t matter to me, I was in the thick of things, a real football league.
Anyway, it’s always exciting to see the fixture list for the new season, especially when you have weddings to attend. We have one in Darlington on 6th September. I was hoping for Sunderland away on the 5th, but joy oh joy, there’s no game! So I can get on with the weekend without worrying about football.
There is another wedding, this one in Leeds, but I can’t remember when that is. I think it’s November, which means I’m probably not missing much then either. So hurray.
The list is here. We aren’t allowed to reproduce the list (read this if you want to see just how daft modern football is) but a quick analysis won’t do any harm:
Portsmouth away – cracking start and should be a grand day out
Blackburn home (likely to be moved for European reasons)
Chelsea home – early season fun
Then it gets messy, with Villa away, Everton home, Wolves away and Arsenal at home, then West Ham away, Hull at home, City away, Liverpool home, Wigan and B’ham away then Bolton at home. We might go through that lot without winning a thing.
Of course thing have moved on and Roy’s made us good, but still a run of hard home games and (well, any) away games is a troublesome prospect.
December gets easier for a time, and January and February look okay, then we have a half-tricky run in (away to Liverpool, home to Wolves, away to Everton, home to West Ham, away to Arsenal). So it’s all about the middle of the season. There seem to be some fairly poor sides in the division this year so hopefully no need to worry, but I am concerned that fixture related issues can lead to hard runs of games which can lead to a loss of perspective (I kept telling people last year that even if we had a great season we’d lose a third of our games and all the misery this would entail) and therefore a bit of unecessary negativity. We shall see.
We’ve signed Birmingham right back Stephen Kelly.
Roy says:
“I am delighted that Stephen has become our first signing of the summer transfer window. He is a talented young full back with experience of playing in the Premier League as well as competing at international level. He will be a useful addition as we look to improve our squad ahead of the start of next season and I am hopeful that we will be able to announce further additions in the coming weeks.”
The offal says:
Kelly made 79 appearances for Birmingham City which included playing every minute of every game in their 2007-08 Premier League campaign. He joined Stoke City on loan in February this year.
Hmm. It’s an interesting one this. He was on loan at Stoke but Tony Pulis decided against keeping him.
Birmingham City’s Stephen Kelly still does not know where his future lies after Stoke City manager Tony Pulis admitted he remains ‘undecided’ whether to make the defender’s loan permanent.
The Potters signed the Republic of Ireland international on loan in February after the Premier League granted them special dispensation because Kelly was unable to travel to Stoke on deadline day in January due to heavy snow.
The 25-year-old did not play a major part in Stoke’s successful battle against relegation, making just two starts and four substitute appearances during his spell at the Britannia Stadium.
However, despite the season being over, Kelly has not yet been handed back to Birmingham and Pulis says he could still be signed up for Stoke’s next Premier League adventure and beyond.
The manager said: “That (Kelly’s deal) is a situation we are still looking at and still undecided about.”
That from late May. As I’ve mentioned before, so much of what a player turns into is the environment he plays in. It will be interesting to see what Roy can make of him, but this instinctively feels like a nice signing.
Also of note, Kelly has a touch of Aaron Hughes in him:
City’s Stephen Kelly is the only outfield player in the Premier League to have played every minute of every game this season but did not hit a single shot in 3420 mins of action.
Aaron did the same this year, or would have had he not been sacrificed for Chris Smalling in the last home game of the season.
So there we are. Nice signing on the surface; we’ll just have to see how he fits into the team when opportunities present themselves (as surely they will).
Also, the new home kit. I think I like it. I’d have preferred the black of the sleeves to seep further across towards the neck, but we’ll have to see what it looks like in the shop. You have to be careful with these white shirts when they have a ‘baggy’ cut. It can look like you’re wearing a table cloth.
(Incidentally, I think the club costs itself money by not releasing all the kits at once. If I could compare them I’d choose the best one and buy one; now I won’t buy the home because the away might be really good, but if I don’t like the away then I’ll have missed that initial ‘new kit’ buzz and might decide against buying either.)
It exacts the strictest discipline
To truly take it easy
Yet still retain the minimal
Quiver of ambition
Required for consciousness.
That’s what I’ve been working on all morning,
Stretched out on the couch,
By the cabin window at Bob’s,
Watching the rain,
Without pattern,
Fall on the pond,
Just me and the dogs.
(Jim Dodge: Practice, Practice, Practice, from Rain on the River, Short poems and Short prose, published by Canongate. I recommend anything of Jim Dodge’s heartily.)
Or in our case, me ‘n’ Woody half-watching the Cup Final while Hade and her folks went to the garden centre looking for a part for a pond pump. I think we found Jim’s groove, either way.
Thanks for playing along nicely so far. I was quite worried that taking this approach would lead to a load of nonsense in the comments, but I think we’re getting some quite interesting discussion about the types of players who might be available and why. Hurray.
While we worry that EastEnders are playing dangerous games with the loyalty of us Bradley Branning fans, on with the show. Signing number three is available on a Bosman and has been linked to us in the past: Oguchi Onyewu.
Sky Sports have started the speculation:
It remains to be seen if either will make a move, with Fulham also said to be showing an interest.
Onyewu himself admits he is ready to take a chance and leave Standard.
“I’m ready to take that risk,” he admitted.
“It would not be the first time. When I arrived at Standard, I was third choice. Even at La Louviere (in 2003), I was not in the team.”
The problem Roy Hodgson has is that if you’re to get players of sufficient quality they want to start, and if they’re not good enough to start they’re arguably not good enough to have. So you need, somehow, to find players who are almost certainly good enough but who would not take exception to not starting games (and who won’t demand huge money). This effectively means players from overseas – who may need to adjust to the league and to the coaching – and youngsters.
As I have noted before, Chris Smalling is (as best I know) considered a “when” player, not an “if” player, which is terrific news. The downside is that he’s 19 and may need a few years of seasoning before he’s ready to be the man in the defence. You can spot him for suspensions (as Chris Baird is used now) but a regular run may be asking a lot. Baird can be used all over the back four and as a holding midfielder, but does seem to be a ‘handy man’ rather than someone who would expect regular use.
So we do need a usable third centre-back.
The gamble I’m taking here is that, if he needs to, Roy can dial the team’s adventurous down to about “3″ and make life relatively easy for a new centre-back. The training sessions should do the rest and, in time, I think a new centre-back could fit in nicely. We must remember, a back four of Paintsil, Hughes, Hangeland and Konchesky would have caused much head scratching two years ago; now it’s the best we’ve seen (more or less). So the lack of a big name really means nothing; what’s important is that the player is coachable, and has the raw materials to play in the league.
Onyewu is huge. He can withstand even the most physical forwards, and with Hodgson’s coaching, can surely play in that ‘first change’ centre-back role, with an eye on forcing his way into the team. He has previous – a dodgy spell at Newcastle – but I think any right minded person would be happy to ignore defensive misdemeanors up there. It’s a Bermuda Triangle for centre-backs on so many levels. Just look at Abdoulaye Faye, who would be the featured article if there was a chance in hell Stoke City would let him go.
I am deliberately aiming low here. No disrespect to Onyewu, but I want Hughes and Hangeland to be our first choice pairing next season. I just feel the need for a reasonably able deputy, someone to stand in should one of the main two take a knock or need a rest, someone to add to the competition for places. Onyewu has the physical tools, has played in Europe for some time now, and would have no language issues. I think he could be a sound freebie.
Click on the cover to order.
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