Martin Jol hailed Dimitar Berbatov’s professionalism and eagerness to impress after the Bulgarian marked his first start for Fulham with a first-half brace that set Jol’s side on their way to a comfortable win over West Brom.
Jol felt the Berbatov who orchestrated much of Fulham’s approach play this afternoon was somewhat different to the striker he had last worked with at Tottenham. The Fulham manager also explained that, after injury robbed him of Croatian forward Mladen Petric, Berbatov had to play in a slightly different role behind Hugo Rodallega as the home side were also without the services of Bryan Ruiz.
I think he was different than I have seen him before. He was all over the pitch, he was heading balls away from his own goal, he was in midfield, he was winning balls, he was up front. He had to play in the hole and be the sort of anchor man and he did that, so I was ever so pleased because we did not have a number 10.
I don’t know about unplayable but when I had him at Spurs he was a top striker, when he was at Leverkusen he was a top striker and I think he did ever so well for Manchester United. He was their top scorer all the time so hopefully he can do the same here.
That was the only criticism. We were two goals up and should have taken the game away from them, but we didn’t do that. We should have scored the third goal earlier, but I thought we dominated the game even before the sending-off.
