Fulham’s fine victory over league leaders Wolverhampton Wanderers yesterday shows just how much Slavisa Jokanovic’s side have improved in the space of four months, according to midfielder Kevin McDonald.
The Whites underlined their own promotion credentials by inflicting Wolves’ first away league defeat since October at Craven Cottage last night courtesy of goals from Ryan Sessegnon and Aleksandar Mitrovic. McDonald, who spent three seasons with Wolves, feels the quality of Fulham’s performance when compared with their meek capitulation at Molineux before Christmas is a measure of how far his side have progressed during their twelve match unbeaten run.
The Scottish midfielder told Fulham’s official website that beating the league leaders was an outstanding achievement:
Under the lights at the Cottage, it was a really good performance, a great win that was thoroughly deserved. They got going a bit at the start of the second half, but they needed to, they’re top of the league, they couldn’t afford to come here and lose, but I thought we did really well from start to finish. We applied ourselves incredibly, and it shows that we’re on a great run.
They’re at the top, they deserve to be there as they’ve done fantastic throughout the whole season, so total respect to them but that shows you how far we’ve come. We’ve put in a great performance, at times played them off the park, they didn’t know what to do, and all in all it’s a great three points.
McDonald felt the home side handled Wolves’ frightening abundance of attacking talent in the forward areas well – and were well worth their victory.
They’ve got good players, good attacking players. Their counter attack was unstoppable at times really. They got in a few times and it was really hard to deal with, so we coped with it well I thought and it could have gone either way, but we got the goal at the right time. I felt we were well worthy winners, and I’m sure they’d say the same.
The former Sheffield United midfielder had words of praise for Mitrovic, who led the line superbly, and scored a wonderful clinching goal.
I thought Mitro was really good. He bullied their defence, he brought us up the pitch plenty of times. It’s a different option for us and he deserved that goal. Fair play to him, it topped off a good performance from him.
McDonald admitted that the buzz of the occasion helped him come through an early injury scare – and was delighted to claim a precious three points.
I had a bit of an injury at the start, I was hopeful I’d get through it, and the adrenaline and the fans kept me going. Last 10 minutes I blew up, I was so tired at the end that I think I gave the ball away more in the last 10 minutes than I did the whole game! It was one of them, but I was happy to get through the game, and to get three points for the team is huge.
