Any reservations that Martin Jol had about signing Pavel Pogrebnyak were soon banished as the Russian striker scored a hat-trick within ten minutes of his first training session.
The Fulham manager moved quickly to bring the Russian striker in a short-term deal from Stuttgart after Bobby Zamora joined QPR and, despite recognising that the deal represented a risk, Jol was soon content that he’d made the right decision. His trust in the former Zenit striker has been swiftly repaid with Pogrebnyak scoring twice in his first games – his second being the winner against QPR on Saturday.
It was a risk (to sign Pogrebynyak from Stuttgart) but after the first training session he scored a hat-trick in 10 minutes. Before, he scored one in two in his own country and he has 45 caps.
But Stuttgart had four or five strikers and when he wasn’t playing well they took him off. I told him you will play games here and that’s what he needs. He’s a real number nine. These players from abroad sometimes need weeks, maybe months to settle in, so to see what Pavel’s doing is very good.
Jol also revealed that he switched to a 4-4-2 on Saturday after Fulham had torn Rangers apart back in October using that system – saying he’s a ‘simple’ tactician.
Recently, we have been playing 4-3-3, but we switched back to 4-4-2 because we beat them at our ground using the same system – and I’m a simple man.
