Scott Parker rued the ‘silly goals’ that gifted Manchester City a straightforward win at Craven Cottage after Fulham had made life difficult for the runaway league leaders in the first half.
A thirteen minute collapse after the break saw Pep Guardiola’s side score three times without reply and the visitors ultimately strolled to a simple victory. Parker was disappointed with Fulham’s defending and promised that he would be working hard to analyse what went wrong in those key moments, but insisted there were elements of his side’s tactical approach that he was pleased with,
“We tried to take the game to the best team in Europe and this division. I thought we did do that. We conceded silly goals in the second half, which is disappointing but the players know that. I asked the team to be brave and show a way about us to try and assert ourselves on Man City. For large parts they did very well but it was some silly goals really.
“We came out in the second half with a platform. The disappointing thing was to concede early. That 15-minute period made it a real uphill task. I didn’t want the game to pass this team by and they didn’t do that, but we struggled in certain moments.”
The Fulham boss backed Tosin Adarabioyo to bounce back quickly from his own mistake which led to the concession of a penalty, converted by Sergio Aguero, for City’s third goal.
“It’s a big learning curve for Tosin. He’s been exceptional and top-class for us. But like a lot of the players here, he’s young and developing, they will make mistakes. It’ll be down to how quickly they learn from these errors. He will learn fast; he’ll understand the differences to make and we’ll move on as a team.”
Parker remains upbeat that his side can escape the relegation zone with nine games of the season to go.
“Confidence is key to how we’ve put ourselves in this fighting position. We’re well organised and we’ve been resilient. We’ve come out the other side of these little mistakes throughout the season. We’ll work out where we went wrong and improve. We won’t write this off. We need to move on, but we need to analyse the way we conceded goals. It’ll be one we need to work out how to improve in those moments. We will look to where we need to be next which is Leeds on Friday.”
92 minutes of football and not one shot on target. I know it was Man City but for
a team trying to stay up this was worse than poor. All very well to blame defensive
mistakes but Man City could have had Bo Jo in goal and still probably won !
We have gone back to trying to play the ball out of defence which we are not good enough at doing,Caveleiro is prone to giving the ball away and has cost us again,why don’t we play some long balls upfield from defence to Lookman who is very good at keeping the ball and getting the ball into the box. Mitro has to start our next game,also why didn’t Scott mention Bobby Reid was injured, he said he had a full squad to pick from before the game. I still think RLC is very lazy and needs to do more,our midfield weren’t really involved and Lookman didn’t get much service from them.We will have to improve 100per cent to beat Leeds,we have to get the ball forward much faster and we have to start scoring goals if we are to stay up so come on Fulham.
Following our Anfield win, and a successful first half, I feel a couple of our players might have let the press hype go to their heads.
Agree with JB . Lets avoid playing too much from the back , get balls up to Lookman and CAV and then they into Mitro or Maja . RLC seems too much hype – Last of the on-loans that we should think of coming in permanently . I think we miss TC too But all in all Parker has done great job. . COYW