Tim Ream saluted the commitment of his Fulham team-mates as he lauded ‘a great performance’ following the Whites’ 2-0 win over Championship leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers on Saturday night.
The American central defender, who continued his own fine form in keeping the division’s best attack quiet, suggested the victory laid down a marker for Fulham’s own promotion credentials after their previous home win over Aston Villa. Speaking to FulhamFCTV, Ream revealed that Slavisa Jokanovic’s side were keen to take the attack to Wolves after coming away from last Wednesday’s trip to Bristol City with a point:
I don’t think we can have any complaints. To take three points off the top team in the Championship – and the team that looked like they were running away with it all season – score two goals, keep a clean sheet and get the job done is a nice feeling. We wanted to attack and do something different to what we did at their place earlier in the season. There’s not going to be any sucker punches at the Cottage, we want to dictate the pace of play and we did that.
It was a great performance and that’s been pretty much the standard since we started this run over the Christmas period. Everybody knows their role and everybody’s contributing, putting effort in and doing work on both sides of the ball. When you do that good things happen, you start picking up points, gain a little bit of momentum and here we are now – taking down the top team in the Championship after we took down Villa last week and got a good away point at Bristol [City].
You respect everyone and you fear no-one. We’ve really put it to teams when they’ve come here, we’ve obviously rode a little bit of luck for a few games but you need luck sometimes and I don’t think any team wants to come here now. We beat Villa 2-0, beat Wolves 2-0 and teams are now definitely on the lookout for us.
The former Bolton defender was characteristically modest about his own intervention that prevented Benik Afobe from pulling a goal back for Wolves with five minutes to play
It’s a different game if they can finish that chance off. I was joking with Betts [Marcus Bettinelli] after the game that it felt like I had to slide five or ten yards just to put him off. I don’t know that I was actually expecting to get anything on the ball but give him something to think about – at the same time, don’t take him down. I was more annoyed that it bounced right back to him and Jota almost gave them a goal and it would have been a nervy finish from there, but I think for the most part we were very comfortable at the back.
I wouldn’t get too carried away Fulham – QPR, SHEFF UTD and FOREST beat us and look were they are, Cardiff didn’t beat us they kicked us off the park ably assisted by a corrupt ref, if they had played football we would have beat them.