Roy Hodgson admits his players are showing signs of fatigue but is delighted that his Fulham side haven’t hit the ‘wall’ as they enter the closing stages of a long season.
Fulham played their 44th game of the campaign on Sunday and were happy to take a point from a rather dour draw at Sunderland. There’s still plenty of excitement to come though with an FA Cup quarter final against Tottenham on Saturday and the prospect of two Europa League ties against Juventus shortly afterwards.
I keep expecting the players to hit the wall after all the games we’ve played this season but they keep proving me wrong. When you reach the quarter-finals of the FA Cup and the last 16 of the Europa League there are a lot of teams sat at home watching on television who would happily swap places with us.
We don’t have the kind of squad where we can make wholesale changes. We know what our best team is and we try to get it on the field.
The good thing is that if we can survive the early part of March, then who knows? Paul Konchesky is close to a return, while Clint Dempsey and Kagisho Dikgacoi might not be that far away either. So going into the latter part of the season we might have the sort of squad we had at the start of January before that disastrous month robbed us of all those players who would give us a welcome boost.
Then comes the great quote I alluded to earlier as Hodgson contemplates Premier League safety.
We’re now up to 38 points in the league and, with 10 games left to play, that gets rid of that Sword of Damocles hanging over us. We can be reasonably confident we’ve secured another season in the Premier League, which is our main target each year.
