Andreas Pereira certainly isn’t resting on his laurels as he prepares for Fulham’s Premier League campaign to resume on Boxing Day at Crystal Palace.
The Brazilian international has slotted in seamlessly to Marco Silva’s midfield since moving to Craven Cottage in the summer and is eager to improve on Fulham’s strong start to the season. The 26 year-old told the club’s official website this morning:
“If you would say this before the season, that we’re going to be ninth, I would say that would be difficult, with a lot of big clubs in the Premier League. But we worked hard for it, and it’s paid off. We’ve done well, and we have to keep improving every day. I think the most important thing is to be at the same level that we started with.
The difficult part of the season starts now and we have to show our character and not relax. We have to keep pushing. When I signed at Fulham, everyone was just, ‘We don’t want to get relegated, we want to stay in the Premier League.’ That’s something that’s really important for the club, and for the players. We are ninth but the first thing is we don’t want to go down, we want to stay in the Premier League, and after that we will see where we get.”
Pereira admitted that the concept of a winter break – owing to the World Cup – took some getting used to but, as he demonstrated with a stellar showing in the friendly against West Ham last weekend, the attacking midfielder is raring to go once again despite having already made fifty appearances in 2022.
“I played my 50th game the last game against United, so I was really tired and it came at the right moment. I had two weeks of just relaxing and charging all the batteries. We had two weeks off but we’ve been back training for three weeks.
We’re going to play our first game on the 26th, so it feels like we’ve done another pre-season. We’re preparing ourselves again, so it was a bit of a strange feeling having the World Cup in the middle of the season.”
