Fulham number two Steve Kean was delighted with Fulham’s battling display at Anfield that officially confirmed their Premier League status for another season.
The Whites were indebted to goalkeeper Edwin van der Sar for a superb penalty save from Steven Gerrard and Kean was pleased with the way Chris Coleman’s side successfully managed to frustrate the hosts and create a few openings of their own.
He told Fulham’s official website:
“It’s a tough place to go to get anything. So to come away with a point is very pleasing. We felt we had a lot of very good chances; Bobby Petta had one, so did Collins John in the first half, then there was Steed’s scissor kick – we had plenty of opportunities. But to be fair so did they, so a draw wasn’t a bad result and we would have settled for that before the game.
We knew that Liverpool had to come out and attack us. We changed our shape a little bit – we played with two men up front instead of one so that we could have an extra target, and we hoped that the power and pace of Boa and Collins would cause them problems on the counter-attack, which they did.
“We said to the boys in the first half to play it quite narrow because Liverpool play the midfield diamond – if we’d have been too spread out, Smicer and Kewell could have got in between our players and caused us problems. So we tried to be narrow and compact and that worked pretty well for us.”
Kean heaped praise on van der Sar for his penalty heroics.
“It was a fantastic, fantastic save. He had a brilliant game all round. In many ways Edwin is his own biggest critic, and he was very hard on himself after the Blackburn game. But he’s been brilliant in a lot of games this season; he was again against Liverpool and that’s four clean sheets he’s kept now in the last five matches.”
