Fulham at Newcastle United

Saturday begins the holiday fixture crunch that sees our heroes play 4 matches in 11 days. Newcastle have been inconsistent and, inexplicably, much better on the road than at home. That's the good news.
The bad news? We're still a joke defensively. They've only won two more matches and have seven more points than we do, but have conceded 20...TWENTY fewer goals than we have. Salomon Rodon has had a couple of scoring streaks, and tallied the only goal in their win at Huddersfield Saturday. Martin Dubravka has been a solid netminder, and could have been their MOTM instead of Rondon last week. DeAndre Yedlin should be back after a red card against Wolves two games ago. Will Mitro be more motivated to prove the Toons made a mistake by not giving him a chance? Dunno, but it would be nice if he had a big match against them. We need to sort out the defense now. Whether we make any progress in that facet of the game or not will determine whether or not we can get back into the win column.

 

13 of the other 19 teams in the league have given up fewer goals than Fulham's goal differential (-26).

 

Ouch!!!

Not going to lie, would gladly take a espnfc headline of: Newcastle and Fulham Play to Drab 0-0 Draw.

 

Agreed. I’d gladly settle for a clean sheet from our boys. If they just happened to score, too, well, wouldn’t that be something?
Sess is still out and, considering his performance the last time we visited St. James, that hurts.

 

I'm thrilled we got the "No Clean Sheet" monkey off our backs. Sadly I can't join in the dancing banana festivities. The defensive shape seemed to be an improvement, but Newcastle looked poor on their own so I don't know if it was a good measure of progress. It felt like the defense was teetering on collapse the whole match, but maybe that's how the previous matches have conditioned me to think. On the offensive side Fulham was anemic. For most of the game Fulham couldn't get anything going because it was almost like 3 vs. 8 on the Newcastle half of the field since so many Fulham players were sitting back on defense. There was too little movement and not enough urgency on counter attacks - until Kamara came in. He pushed forward and made opportunities, but for the second week in a row he couldn't figure out how to finish. If Sessegnon was in that slot I think they win today. I'll take this as a step in the right direction, but I'm not getting my hopes up.