Marco Silva praised Fulham’s professionalism as the Whites reached the third round of the League Cup with a comfortable win at Birmingham City this evening.
The Whites raced into an early two-goal lead thanks to a penalty from Raul Jimenez and Jay Stansfield’s sublime strike inside the first fifteen minutes. Their League One opponents battled hard in the second half but Steven Benda made two fine reflex stops to keep a clean sheet on his debut – and Silva professed to be pleased by the evening’s work during his post-match press conference.
“It doesn’t matter about the individual quality of the players when you make 11 changes – five players made their debut this this evening, plus Josh King in the second half, the number is big, even if you are talking about some of them, experienced Premier League players – they never played together and it’s going to take time to gel everything. I took the decision because I want all of them to be in the right physical shape. It’s not because fatigue is not in the thinking for the next game, it is really because most of them need these types of games to be at same level.
I think it was a tough game, tough place to come. It was a very good test for us in the middle of the week, away from home. It was our aim to keep a clean sheet, that was important too. They had a lot of corners and crosses, and I think our backline responded well.
We got the penalty and, of course, a very good assist from Andersen – excellent move from Jay and we scored. 2-0, in that moment we should probably be calmer and keep the ball more to control the game – in some moments was not possible, but we were solid enough to control the intensity of the game and the energy that they play with. We are in the next round – that is the most important thing.”
We are in the next round and that’s all that really matters. On paper, this starting eleven looked pretty impressive. In reality, our lack of real strength in depth showed itself with so many players underperforming. Jiminez, apart from a well taken penalty, was particularly poor as was Harry Wilson who spends more time on his backside than on his feet.
Thankfully, we saw what Jay Stansfield is capable of, yet again, and, hopefully, we will see a lot more of him in the weeks to come. His speed off the mark is nuts and, with Joachim Andersen’s ability to spray those accurate long passes, it is almost like having a secret weapon at our disposal.
One thing that simply HAS to be sorted out is the captaincy. Having Bernd Leno as the skipper is nonsensical. Last night, Tom Cairney, as club captain, rightly started the game as skipper but, when he was subbed, the armband was passed to Harrison Reed. Then, when it was his turn to depart, it was handed to Jiminez. it was a bit like a 100 metre relay race. Not one of these three is a starter. Give the captaincy to Joachim Andersen, starting on Saturday. He is a natural leader and can influence things on the pitch. As an example, Stansfield says that Joachim told him to start making those runs from deep after 20 minutes and he hit him perfectly with his pass. He did a great job the last time he was here.