Craven Cottage Newsround

Possibly.

Good article here in the Independent. (hat-tip to Pat at TiFF)

Then, added Brown, there are players who are world-beaters in training, but not in matches. “Dickson Etuhu, who I had at Preston, was fantastic in training, but not so good in matches. Roy Hodgson [Fulham's manager] rang me about Etuhu. I said, ‘If you can get him to play for Fulham the way he does in training, and I think with your experience you can, you have got the next Patrick Vieira’.”

Excellent look at the WBA game.

Here’s a recommendation that you simply may not ignore.

“A Cultured Left Foot” by Musa Okwonga. (publisher’s page: http://www.ducknet.co.uk/general/title.php?titleissue_id=388 )

Okwonga is an Old Etonian. I used to work with an Old Etonian, and he was at once bright, eccentric, curious, hilarious. These qualities are in evidence in Okwonga’s prose. His writing is almost poetic, leading you to insights that had previously been just beyond your grasp. I’ve only read three chapters but this is a keeper, one to read and re-read down the line. It couldn’t be better.

In short, Okwonga is fascinated by greatness. What makes a great player? He has eleven themes to explore, the first three being feet, balance, and fun. A great player needs great feet, he suggests, so spends a chapter talking about footballers’ feet. A great footballer needs great balance, so he talks about that, colouring his ideas with examples from the real world, Ryan Giggs, Garrincha, Archie Gemmill. It’s just brilliant reading. He splices his thoughts and examples with discussions with experts, a ballerina (for balance), a foot specialist (for feet), and it’s never less than riveting. The third chapter is ‘fun’. Does a great footballer have to have, or be, fun? He talks about Brazilians and their extrovert play, contrasting this with the melancholic genius of Zinedine Zidane, the sad story of Paul Gascoigne and the madness of Roy Keane. He also quotes cricket’s Ed Smith, who is certain that most top sportsmen try too hard, rather than too little, as assumed by many of those watching them. That rings a bell, does it not?

I can’t recommend this enough. I couldn’t wish for a better book about football.

My copy came straight from Crockatt & Powell, Fulham Road. Independent booksellers rule, especially excellent ones like Matthew and Adam.

Email them at info at crockattandpowell dot com for your copy! It’s £7.99 in paperback, I think.

(the balance chapter talks about goals like these… drool)

Dempsey to QPR?

American international Clint Dempsey was the subject of interest once more, for a possible loan spell, but according to the Hounslow Chronicle the deal was shelved due to the injury woes of the R`s West London rivals.

An R`s Insider told the Hounslow Chronicle: ‘We need some extra firepower to make sure the promotion plan remains on track.’ - Hardly required an insider to tell you that one I feel!

Dempsey is an attacking midfielder who can also be deployed as a striker, and he comes with a wealth of international experience scoring 9 goals in 28 appearances for his native USA.

The 25 year old made the £1.5m move from New England Revolution to Fulham back in the January transfer window of 2007. If this deal is tacitly dependent on Fulham`s injury list it may well be resurrected at a later date as the likes of the £6m rated Kamara gets back to full fitness.

I’m linking to Vital Football, which is one of those things you try not to do, but they’re referring to the Hounslow Chronicle so it ought to be safe enough.

Dowie delighted with Cook.  I read a match report recently that said Cook looked like Gheorghe Hagi!  Strange Days…

Some decent stuff in the Independent today:

Here

and

here

We’re number 5 in their debt table.  It’s interesting how others have avoided debt.  Check b+w_geezer’s series on Fulham Finances, incidentally, linked to in the sidebar.

5. Fulham

Owner: Mohamed al-Fayed

Debt: c£180m

Wholly reliant for survival on Fayed, who would sell if he could recoup losses.

Proceed at your peril…

Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by a posting on TiFF, here’s something interesting.

We’ll expect more shots to be on target as the season wears on, but the conversion of said shots into goals isn’t necessarily an outlier.   I’d have put money on teams being more bunched on this than they are, but not so:  you can be bad at shooting all season.   So while Hull and Stoke have benefitted this year and Man Utd and Spurs are struggling (suggesting that this is not all about skill) Birmingham and Reading kept up a good ratio all last season.  Which suggests that Brum and Reading were either lucky with their shooting all year or went down because of their defence.  Either way, this is something we need to be wary of.

Will a defensive midfielder fix this?  Surely not.  No, there’s a good suggestion that, to whatever extent our start has been ‘difficult’, this has not been because of our defensive play.   We need to make and take chances.   Which is why I want Dempsey and Gera in the side.   But that’s an argument for another day.

The bookies generally know what they’re doing. I don’t want to oversimplify, but I believe the following is a fair argument for calming down. For each game you can see the decimal odds Ladbrokes gave for each outcome (thanks to Football Data for the info.)

Oh look, we’re exactly where they expected us to be.

Sure there are problems, but did anyone honestly expect there not to be?  That’s football.  If you’re going to lose games (and we are) then you’ll make mistakes, be less than perfect.

I’ll do a full post in the near future looking at some of the perceived issues, but in my opinion we’re almost doing alright. Could be better, of course, but there’s a long way to go.

Oh. Dear.

Audio here.

(Lots of swearing)

We’re definitely not playing Andy Johnson (suspended) and possibly not playing Bobby Zamora (ill), so perhaps this will see Roy employ a slight variation on the previously seen 4-4-2.

Tony Mowbray has been in the press saying how he expects to station a man in front of the WBA back four to help throttle our midfield, and a man behind our midfield to take advantage of that wide, wide gap. All very sensible. We’re the away team, what do we do?

Who knows, but this seems like an ideal opportunity to try a 4-5-1. Dickson Etuhu isn’t ready, Leon Andreasen and Andranik didn’t set the world on fire against Burnley, but nevertheless, an approach aimed at stiffening our occasionally lightweight midfield seems like a sensible approach. The charts below are the Telegraph’s density maps from three 4-5-1 games last season. The players with red squares are the midfield ‘3′.

No real pattern there, except that the midfield is obviously reinforced numerically. I don’t recall this helping especially during the games in question, but there’s no doubt that extra people in the middle of the park should be helpful, especially against a team like West Brom who will try to pass the ball around. One thing that strikes me about the above is that the extra midfielder isn’t really ’shielding’ as such, more joining in with everyone else. Probably a personnel issue (we don’t have a natural shielding player) but quite interesting nevertheless. Certainly Andreasen runs around like a dog just released from its lead. Indeed, Danny Murphy was the deepest of the midfielders when we played this way.

I don’t know what any of this means, and Roy’s current approach seems to be that we should play the same way every week and back ourselves to do this at a level conducive to getting a result, but perhaps tomorrow’s circumstances dictate some minor shift in policy. We shall see.

Stoke Reserves 2-2 Fulham Reserves

FULHAM: Stockdale, Stoor, Anderson (Briggs 83), Leijer, Smalling, Milsom, Brown (Saunders 90), Andranik, Smith (Hoesen 70), Nevland, Gray. Subs: Foderingham, Brown (gk).

He didn’t score a hat-trick or anything though.

Nice to see Danny Hoesen’s name there.  I think I’m right in saying that this is his first ‘competitive’ outing for the club, something to do with international clearance.

Finally, nice to see a proper reserve team isn’t it?  Say what you will about Roy, but he’s whipped the club into shape quite nicely.  I mean, sure, in an ideal world you’d want better players thoughout the system, but we’ve come a long way in a short time.   I last saw the reserves a couple of years ago and didn’t know who anyone except Bjorn Runstrom was.    Now the side’s being used to get the promising youngsters a game, and to get the fringe players match action.

I posted this some time ago, but I was reminded of it again recently by the terrific USS Mariner baseball site.  So:

Jimmy Bullard’s saying the same thing today really:

We lost last Saturday but I thought we were unlucky, we had a crazy five minutes but it happens. We had a right old go in the second-half and overall I don’t think we can be too disappointed with the way we played. You’ve just got to keep playing and believing

I think that’s a sensible approach to a long season, and one that we’ve heard from Roy over and over.

He also says:

“You’re not going to win the league after five game and you’re not going to get relegated after five. People can make mountains out of molehills either way.

“But that’s football nowadays and that’s what people talk about. You’re never going to get anything in the middle, its either good or bad – that’s why people listen to phone-ins or buy the papers because it’s a good read. No one wants to talk about middle ground because no one would want to read about it.

This is my perspective entirely.  But it sometimes feels like I’m in the minority.

Villa, home: subbed after 70 minutes, lone striker, replaced by McBride.   We scored almost immediately after he went off, then added another later on.

Boro, away: subbed after 64 minutes, lone striker, replaced by McBride.  Not much happened for us that day.

Man Utd home: on in 91st minute in a game we’d lost horribly.

Reading away: on in the 83rd minute, scored in the 90th.  A game we’d dominated but not put away.  Nevland made it safe.

Liverpool home: on 76, bad game for Fulham, lost 2-0, can’t remember any impact.

Man City away: on 71 for McBride, straight after we’d scored a goal (seems unlike Roy doesn’t it?).  Hauled down for equalising penalty.  We scored again in the 90th minute.

Birmingham home:  on 67 for Kamara, scored 87 to seal win.

Portsmouth: on 72 for Dempsey, we scored in the 76th minute to win 1-0.

Hull away:  on 85, 2-1 down.

Bolton: on 85, 2-1 up.

(also Leicester in the cup when he scored but was offside)

It’s a pretty decent track record so far.  Noteworthy that he’s started twice and been fairly invisible (not entirely his fault), then come on as a sub and done well.    It’s hard to know the extent to which he was the beneficiary of a team hitting its stride or whether he was a vital part of that team hitting its stride.   I think it’s fair to say that he did his bit.

Roy’s sub patterns much more varied, although I guess with McBride coming back to fitness this was a clear need, and Kamara got a couple of knocks I seem to recall.  The Portsmouth sub (on for Dempsey) was a fairly attacking move.

In summation, you shouldn’t really read the above and spontaneously combust over his lack of use this year.   He’s done a good job when called upon but there’s nothing there to suggest that his absence is costing us dear.   One player simply doesn’t make that much of a difference, particularly a fringe player, however effective he might be.

My guess is that we’ll see more of Nevland as the season wears on, but that he’s unlikely to grow from his current role.   We’ll probably see the odd start and he might do well and he might not (just like most forwards!) but there’s nothing here to get angry about.

John Paintsil’s heart-warming words remind us that “Roy not making subs” is not the same as “Roy doing nothing”.

Playing ten against eleven against a team that is leading by two goals wasn’t easy for us. When we went into the dressing room, the Manager changed things around and we pushed forward, pushing the right and left backs more forward and that changed a lot for us.

I’ll do the Telegraph density maps later in the week, but from them it’s clear that Simon Davies was operating as a second forward, playing, in total, further forward than both Zamora and Johnson.  Now we get confirmation from Paintsil that the full-backs were pushing on.   I noticed Paintsil roving in the second half, and thought he did that quite well, but Paul Konchesky worries me somewhat when asked to do too much attacking.

Paul Doyle of the Guardian has something about Roy’s subs too, incidentally.

That could be construed as an admission of the lack of his squad’s depth, and certainly the absence of a specialist left winger was punishing, though either Seol Ki-Hyeon or Clint Dempsey could reasonably have been expected to be more visible than the ghostly Zoltan Gera. Chris Baird and Toni Kallio may also have been more reliable in the full-back berths than the negligent John Pantsil and Paul Konchesky. But not “definitely”.

“Definitely” was the key word in Hodgson’s explanation. By using it he left himself open to accusations of indecision or excessive caution. If we reflect on a record of success that extends well beyond last season’s great escape, we may instead deduce that his refusal to gamble on a substitution attests to the strength of his conviction in his methods, a belief, borne of his rich experience, that if you keep performing well you will eventually be rewarded.

Fair enough, all this.  I think that, as usual, we’re slightly overreacting, but it’s a trend that does bear watching.   Roy must have purchased the likes of Andreasen, Andranik and Etuhu for a reason; I’m sure if we’re patient we’ll see them.

The main thing is points on the board, and we’re about par for the course at the moment.  No need to panic just yet.

From the telegraph, via the press association, who count these things impartially.  The talk of Seol not tackling is nonsense.   He does his bit.

He might or might not be a good player, but he is not the player people think he is.