Goals change games, don’t they? Take the three goals away and you might call it an evenish contest. But of course you can’t take the three goals away, much as you might like to.

What a farce they all were. Sandro, dawdling just inside his own half, decides to have a dig. You’d say it was an insult to Mark Schwarzer, except the shot went in, swerving nastily and hopping over his hands. But even so. If David Stockdale had let that in it’d be proof that he’s not ready. I don’t know what it says about Schwarzer but I suspect there’s a reason you don’t see that many goalkeepers keep playing towards 40 odd. It feels a bit wrong criticising Schwarzer, as good a goalkeeper as Fulham will ever have, but this is part of the problem with playing a player to such an advanced age. When is a mistake just a mistake? When is it a sign of fading powers?

Bad became worse when Sigurdsson thoroughly fooled Philippe Senderos on the edge of the area and teed up Defoe for the sort of chance he lives on. Then Dempsey threaded a ball through our zig-zagged offside trap, Senderos again found himself partly playing offside, partly trying to intercept the ball, and of course he did neither and Spurs had a third. You could see the frustration in the big defender, and I felt for him: he hasn’t deserved the negativity his play sometimes attracts, but when he does make a mistake it’s proof that the naysayers were right all along.  When you look at his Fulham career he has generally done well, and our results haven’t been any worse with him than without him, but once people make up their minds… in any case, he had a bit of a disaster today. 

Other things: Gareth Bale annoyed me. After throwing himself over a tackle he got a yellow card. He then sarcastically clapped the referee. Certainly it would be harsh to send someone off for two consecutive minor misdemeanors, but if taking the piss out of the referee isn’t a bookable offence I’m a dutchman. Bale’s not nearly as good as he thinks he is and today did a very good impression of an arrogant prick.

Clint Dempsey had a quiet game and got a bit of stick from the crowd. He might have scored a couple of times but it didn’t quite happen for him, just as it never quite happened for him while he was at Fulham when he didn’t crash the area. Spurs seem to be using him as a second striker but he never got into the dangerous areas he needs to get into. The other former Fulham player, Mousa Dembele, had an understated but excellent game.

It’s hard to judge the Fulham effort because of the scoreline. Without those three mistakes we were more or less at the races in a tight and fitfully absorbing game. With that in mind perhaps you have to give some credit to the players, except… why were we playing so many long balls? What did we hope to achieve? It was enfuriating.  We either won the header, in which case Spurs got the second ball, or we didn’t, and Spurs get the ball anyway. Why so many aimless hoofs? Nobody wanted the ball at the back because Spurs pressed quite well, but something was missing. Ruiz, mainly, but the team seemed to lack a bit of cohesion, partly because of Spurs’ smothering defensive work, but it felt like more than that.

Petric, for instance – a player I like a lot – seems to need a bit more approach work around him, otherwise he looks far too isolated. Berbatov played well but is perhaps trying to do too much and therefore perhaps not always where you need him to be. Dejagah shows promise, Frei the same (although he HAs to be more aggressive in his running!) Sidwell had a strong game, Diarra, too, but… no, this isn’t right, Spurs were pretty good.

We didn’t deserve to lose 3-0 but these things happen when you make mistakes against good teams.

The sort of game that makes you want to kick a dustbin. Fulham, so lively and so bright in recent times, stunned by the usual mess from Stoke, a team of trees that is always greater than the sum of its parts, always seems to have extra players on the pitch. Stoke seem to fill every area, and Fulham’s players rarely found space until a frenetic last ten minutes when we threw the kitchen sink into proceedings. And even then there wasn’t really anywhere to construct anything, as Stoke were packed deep and determined.

It’s hard to know what Martin Jol might have done differently. Without Ruiz the team tried a moderately successful approach that involved Baird, Sidwell and Karagounis in the middle and Berbatov and Petric up front. Dejagah was the true winger in all this.

But the trouble was, we couldn’t settle on the ball, despite having all these midfielders. Stoke eventually scored a very Stoke like goal, a deep cross knocked down by Peter Crouch and swivelled on by an advanced Charlie Adam. It’s not a goal you’d want to concede and it was a shame that Crouch wasn’t troubled more, but this is what Stoke do so well. The disappointment is more that we weren’t able to impose ourselves on them at all, which meant that Begovic had absolutely nothing to do until some late efforts from Berbatov and Petric, the latter in particular making us wonder what might have been: a devilish swirling shot that Begovic didn’t like one bit and spilled.

By then we had Duff on, Rodallega too, but there wasn’t enough exact football in the final third, mainly because Stoke were defending well. What do you do? We have no big target man, that’d be playing into their hands anyway, so the only option was to keep trying to play. Perhaps we might have tried to go through the middle more, and Sidwell’s occasional bursts hinted at something, but it didn’t feel like there were any good answers. We had most of the ball but just couldn’t make anything happen.

We defender okay too. Tony Gale in commentary seemed keen to adopt the fashionable “Senderos is an accident waiting to happen line” whenever Stoke attacked but he didn’t look so bad to me. An average performance in trying circumstances. And Stoke only had two shots on target all game (so did we, of course), so there’s that, too.

You have to look at these games in isolation and in context of others. In isolation it’s a tight defeat at a difficult place to go. In context it’s another game without getting what we want, but at this point nobody need worry – we’ll start winning again soon.