Marco Silva rued more dropped points after Fulham were held to a fourth consecutive draw at Luton this afternoon.
The league leaders had to settle for a point at Kenilworth Road as former Fulham forward Elijah Adebayo’s header cancelled out a first half strike from Aleksandar Mitrovic. Silva couldn’t hide his disappointment afterwards, telling his post-match press conference:
“We’ve lost two points. The game was balanced, a tough game, like we expected. hey are always tough to beat and we knew they would try to take the game from a physical point of view. They have strong bodies, three strong central defenders, the striker is a big boy as well who is always fighting for all the balls.
They are a strong side on second balls as well, but I thought first half we controlled the game very well. We didn’t create big chances but we controlled the first half, didn’t give many things to them. We started the second half in the same way, but in one moment we lost control of the game and unfortunately conceded a set-piece.
After that we reacted, we went again, our players tried until the end, sometimes not with the quality that we normally put on the pitch in our game. We definitely lost two points.”
Silva wants his side to embrace their status as favourites to win most games in the Championship – after acknowledging that the rest of the division is raising their game in matches against the Whites of late.
“It’s true, and I definitely agree with you, but if you want to be there at the top and play every single game to win, if you want to be at Fulham Football Club, you have to be able to face it. We knew they would give everything, they would fight for the first ball, the second ball, and they would try to show their quality as well to show that they could match us, and they did it. It’s up to us to take the game from that physicality and put the game in our way. I think we did that first half. Second half, we were not able to do it.”
The Fulham head coach revealed that Harrison Reed couldn’t be risked after picking up a muscle injury in training and that he would be a doubt for next Monday’s meeting with Sheffield United.
“He got a little muscle injury. We had doubts whether to play him or not, let’s hope next week he will be okay, but we’re not sure.”
That’s 8 points dropped and I thought were not good enough again, very little creativity and bad finishing once again, the only saving point is that Bournemouth lost, we should be winning games like these.
We are sleepwalking to draws , we looked very poor today – I thought Bryan & TC were shocking & Rodaks distribution was questionable too.
We need to win the next two and against a rejuvenated blades side Monday night will be another hard game
Another inept away performance that has, of late, become almost guaranteed.
Dominance without any real threat, an early goal, a failure to finish off the game with a second-then a slow descent into sloppiness with the home team increasingly threatening until the inevitable equaliser.
No Harrison Reed meant that we would be up against it in midfield once the sloppiness set in. Seri was excellent first half but, once again, as the game wore on-in atrocious conditions- he started to give the ball way in suicidal positions. Cairney was fine while we had control but all but disappeared once Luton applied the pressure.
As for Kebano, Wilson and Decordova Reid-why did they even bother lacing up their boots. They were totally anonymous throughout. I forgive Kebano because he has been outstanding of late.
Yet again, Marco Silva seemed content to allow this inevitable erosion of quality and control by failing to change things up until it was just too late.
What the hell did he expect Muniz to achieve with 3 minutes to go?
There is something very wrong in our approach -both mentally and strategically -when we are on the road and Silva needs to address this quickly because we can’t keep consoling ourselves with the fact that, thankfully, Bournemouth, for example, dropped points.
Unfortunately the wheels have come off the wagon at the moment, Apart from Seri the midfield is over run, The two wide players did not have the best of games and we were constantly exposed when Luton attacked down the right> this is not the first time this season we have controlled the first half and been ineffective in the second