Roy Hodgson reckons achieving success in European football is much more difficult nowadays than when he reached the final of the UEFA Cup with Inter Milan.
The Fulham manager saw his Inter side beaten on penalties by Schalke in 1997 but he reckons the achievements of his current Fulham side are much more impressive, due to the sheer number of games you have to play to reach the latter stages of the competition these days.
Ten months is a long time to be playing. These will be our 16th and 17th games in this competition. When I got to the final with Inter, which was a double-headed final, we played 12 games.
Now we’ll have ended up playing 17 even if we go out, so it’s half the season longer. That shows what we have achieved, and in reaching that final at Inter we did not encounter anything like the standard of opposition that we have had to meet here.
Hodgson has again insisted that he has no case to answer over his team selection against Hull City at the weekend with West Ham poised to complain to the Premier League.
We haven’t prioritised. But in one particular game after we played Juventus, Manchester City and Tottenham and prior to playing Wolfsburg, I made the decision to rest four or five players knowing full well I had a right to do that with the quality I have at my disposal.
It meant those players did not play five games in 12 days, when they have been playing five games in 12 days the rest of the time. It’s never happened in my life before, I’ve never had a series where we played every three days for three months.
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