Ryan Fredericks wasn’t too bothered about his first Fulham goal being taken away from him after the Whites won the west London derby at Loftus Road last night.
The Fulham full-back was delighted that Slavisa Jokanovic’s side picked up seven points from a tough week of football with a hard-fought win over QPR and has urged his team-mates to keep grafting to ensure that they continue to climb up the Championship table. The 2-1 win in Shepherd’s Bush puts Fulham a point outside the play-off positions and Fredericks told FulhamFCTV that going on an unbeaten run was what the side were aiming for:
It’s what we want. We need to climb up the table quickly. We haven’t started too great, but the last six or seven days we’ve picked up seven points and we just need to keep on climbing.
Fredericks was pleased with Fulham’s character, especially through nine nerve-wracking minutes of added time after Conor Washington pulled a goal back for the home side.
We knew that was going to happen when they bought big Matty Smith on. We know what he’s about, we knew there was going to be pure balls in the box for the next forty minutes, but we rode it out through nine minutes of extra time as well. It puts us in a great place for the next game as well, we can play nice football and we can also do the other side and scrap it out.
He admitted to being mentally and physically drained after Fulham’s third tough encounter in a week, but gave the impression of loving life in the hustle and bustle of the Championship.
We are, to be fair. That’s what the Championship’s about. You’ve got no time to rest and recover, it’s just game after game. Now we’ve got a couple of weeks, hopefully slow it down a little bit and we’ll be raring to go for the Preston game.
The goalscorer was philosophical about hearing that his first-half strike had been credited as an own goal by Jack Robinson, but was more than happy to have made a significant contribution to another derby win.
The lads after the game told me they’ve taken it away from me, which is very debatable. I thought it was on target myself. It would’ve been my first for Fulham as well. At the end of the day, I ain’t too bothered, to be honest, it’s not really my job to score goals – so if I can help contribute to the team, I’ll claim it as a goal, an assist, whatever, whatever it goes down as I don’t really care. The main thing is the three points.
Everyone knows we’ve easily got the potential and the players to be right up there, even though we didn’t start off too great. I think everyone knows we’re going to be climbing rapidly up the table. We’ve just got to stay calm, keep playing our stuff and we should be up there.
