Bobby’s on good form in this interview with Soccerlens, from which I learned something I never knew. One of my heroes when I was growing up – Micky Adams (who I’ve already written about today) – described Zamora as being better than Alan Shearer. Knowing Micky, he was probably making a serious point whilst yanking the journo’s chain at the same time.
Bobby’s pretty bullish about his poor goalscoring record this season, but makes a reasonable point about the role he’s being asked to play in this Fulham side.
The goals haven’t been coming but, I mean, it’s sort of a different role I have to play really – it’s not all-out attack. When I haven’t got the ball, I’m sitting on the holding centre-midfielder and defending.
I’m not making excuses but every other part of my game has been good, you know: holding the ball up, bringing people into play, and I think somebody said a stat to me the other day that I was up there in terms of creating chances for other people. If I’m not scoring, I’m setting someone else up or setting someone up for a shot.
That’s good enough for me and as long as we win, I couldn’t care if it’s one-nil and [Mark] Schwarzer scores from a goal kick. I really couldn’t care. As long as we win and stay in this division, that’s my main goal.
For myself, as a striker, you’re thought to be scoring goals and doing all of that and attacking but I find the way the gaffer wants it, we’re also doing a hell of a lot of defending and working hard and I think that shows in our team performances.
Bobby also reckons it’s Roy Hodgson’s compulsive organisation that’s made Fulham into such a hard team to beat this season. It might be a little boring to read our players continually lauding the manager, but to my mind it’s interesting to learn what goes on at the training ground and how the boys perceive their boss.
He did a magnificent job at the end of last season, signed a few players but, to be honest, it’s just organisation. I keep saying it and that’s purely what we’ve done. We go in to work and pretty much every day is pretty similar, but it shows on the pitch because everybody knows exactly where we’re supposed to be.
He’s quite hard to sum up actually. He’s quite quiet, doesn’t really need to shout, because you know exactly where you stand with him, which is good.
Zamora’s pretty tight-lipped about Europe, talking of the tough games that remain and perhaps not wanting to get too excited about the prospect of the European tour that some fans have started to plan.
We’ve got two tough games first, you know. We’ve got Newcastle who are fighting for their lives up there and they’ve got sixty-five, seventy thousand people screaming for them [the capacity of St. James’ Park is actually just over 52,000 but then I am a bit of a pedant] – it’s not going to be easy.
Then we’ve got Everton. They’ve have been one of the surprise packages this season, so it’s not going to be easy at all. If we do it, it’ll be lovely, but in all honesty, we’re not looking at that at the minute.
