Tomas Kalas believes Fulham belong in the Championship’s top six and has urged the Whites to use their accumulation of seven points in seven days as a springboard to start the sort of run that carried them into the upper echelons of the table last season.
The Czech central half told FulhamFCTV that he was pleased to keep a clean sheet against Millwall yesterday, but he wants that to become the norm over the coming weeks as Slavisa Jokanovic’s side bid to climb the table. Kalas feels Fulham’s impressive recent form has been a long time in coming and wants to carry that confidence into next weekend’s west London derby with Brentford.
We should have done it much earlier. It’s better to start now than never. It was three tough games. We’ve got seven points, it could have been nine but we’re quite happy with seven after what we’ve been through before and now we’ve just one game each weekend for three or four weeks so let’s get together, let’s work on training and keep it going like that.
When was the last time [we kept a clean sheet]? Three months ago or something like that? We can finally smile and say that we can keep clean sheets! One clean sheet doesn’t make anything, we have to aim for that. We need to stick together on the pitch and when we defend and attack as a team then we can beat the opponent just 1-0.
Kalas acknowledged that Millwall’s direct and imposing football knocked Fulham off their stride in the second half but feels his team-mates will learn an awful lot from having ground out a result against the Lions.
They are aggressive, playing long balls and it is always annoying to play against teams like that but you will find it in every league, especially the Championship or League One. So we have to deal with it and, even though, literally every one of our players was smaller than their smallest player on the pitch, we dealt with it and big credit to everyone on the pitch.
The competitive nature of the Championship means the league remains very congested approaching the festive period and Kalas is adamant that Fulham, having moved into the top half courtesy of Ollie Norwood’s penalty yesterday, belong at least in the play-off positions.
In this competition, you know that if you win two or three times in a row and you are completely in a different position in the table. We just have to try to keep it going and climb up the table. There wasn’t many teams that were better than us [last season] and we have to believe in ourselves because we lost against teams that we shouldn’t have lost [to] and we beat teams that are in front of us or in the top six. I think we belong in the top six and hopefully we will get there as soon as possible.
