Lasse Vigen Christensen was delighted to celebrate extending his contract at Fulham with the winner against Middlesbrough as the Whites came from behind to knock their Premier League opponents out of the EFL Cup last night.
The Danish midfielder signed a further one-year extension to his deal at Craven Cottage and popped up to slide home the decisive goal in extra time – and Christensen is happy to have secured his future with the club he has been at since the age of 17.
It’s always nice to get your future in place and today was just a great performance from all the boys and I was lucky to find myself in the position of finishing it off, so two good days.
It’s nice to have that stability. I know this club so well and I still believe that I can keep developing here and hopefully get back to the way I was before the injuries and all that. That’s hopefully in the past now and I just kick on and get back to where I want to be. I’ve always felt the fans have been quite good to me even though I haven’t been at my best. I’m quite aware of that myself and it’s something I’ve been working really hard on this summer and it’s nice now to feel that I’m getting better and stronger.
Speaking to the club’s official website in a video shot after the final whistle, Christensen credited Fulham with adjusting well to the challenge presented by Aitor Karanka’s side and showing real resilience after falling behind to David Nugent’s eighth minute header.
I think we came out a bit on the back foot, just had to get to grips with how they were doing, how they were playing out from the back and, to be fair, I think we got into our shape and knew what they were going to do, we kept them off most things and then we had some good chances going forward. A lot of young lads showed some good play out there and so it was a great Cup tie in the end.
We were quite clever with it because they had a lot of the ball and we just stayed in our shape and let them have it and as soon as we won it, we’ve tried to break. It worked quite well – we created a few chances and I didn’t really think that they had too much. I think the way we played was the right way for us to do it, and in the end we get our rewards.
Although only 22 himself, Christensen almost cut the figure of an elder statesmen amongst the young side that Slavisa Jokanovic selected for the Cup tie – and he lavished praise on the latest crop of talented youngsters to graduate from the Fulham academy.
They have been a credit to themselves for the full pre-season and also the games here in the Cup. We’ve got some great young players coming through – they are so young, I think you forgot how young they are because they do look very ready for it, physically and in the way they play. It was a really good experience for them to go out and play against a Premier League side.
We should take a lot of confidence from tonight, especially as a lot of the boys that played for us tonight are the ones who haven’t played so much this season, so it shows how good the squad is and how many players are eager to show what they can do to try to get closer to the starting eleven.
The Dane is desperate to continue Fulham’s unbeaten start against Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park on Saturday afternoon.
Right now we obviously have that feeling that we’re not going to get beat and everyone is working really hard to do all the right things so as a team we end up getting good results and right now it all seems to work in our favour, even though we’ve had a few draws that we would probably want to be wins. It’s just really important not to lose games – that’s something that we can really take going forward.
