Fulham at Manchester City

Fulham will travel to the Etihad to face Manchester City on Saturday. The good news is that Fulham's international players made it through the break without picking up any additional injuries. The bad news is that Tom Cairney is still recovering from his ankle injury and Jokanovic says Tim Ream has a back problem and he has no idea when he will return (https://www.football.london/fulham-fc/fulham-injury-news-slavisa-jokanovic-15148638)

Manchester City is, of course, a really good team. Defending league champions who are keen to repeat. However, Wolverhampton showed them to be mortals by holding a lead for 12 minutes and eventually settling for a draw at Molineaux three weeks ago.

I'm a bit pessimistic on our chances so I'm mainly looking at this as a chance to see how we compare to a top level football team. The BBC had an article that looked at trends in the first four matches (https://www.bbc.com/sport/football/45470560) and there was an interesting chart that showed which teams have the most strings of 10+ passes and the number of times they create chances. Here's the chart:


You can see Fulham's position on the table and it shows the kind of football Jokanovic wants to play - similar to the top teams in the league. Jokanovic's desire to control the ball and not just set up camp in the defensive half opens us up to offensively minded teams, but it also generates lots of chances for Fulham (note the two right columns). I could easily see Fulham getting hammered 5-1 if Manchester City effectively takes advantage of when Fulham pushes forward. A narrow 1-0 loss with Fulham holding their own for much of the match doesn't get us any more points, but it would make me feel more confident about how the team is playing. I'm expecting nothing from this match - it is an experiment with interesting findings regardless of the final score.

 

What's our best starting 11 vs ManCity? I'd like to see Slav keep faith with the passing style. Not much to lose, other than goals, and it'd let us measure the team up against the best. I'd like to see: Betts-Bryan, Odoi, Mawson, Christie-McDonald, Anguissa, Seri-Sess, Mitro, Schurrle. But I bet Slav will mix it up more, and may opt for a more defensive posture.

 

The starting XI

Bettinelli
Christie, Odoi, Mawson, Sessegnon
McDonald, Seri, Johansen
Vietto, Mitrovic, Schurrle

Subs: Fabri, Fosu-Mensah, Le Marchand, Chambers, Bryan, Anguissa, Ayite

Two new starting fullbacks from the last match. That doesn't surprise me, but I'm a little surprised to see Sessegnon start on the back line rather than Bryan. I thought Sessegnon might be held to come on later either for offense or for defense depending on the situation. Johansen also gets his first Premier League start over Anguissa.

 

Yeah, this ain’t Roy Hodgon’s Fulham. There’s little hope of grinding out a result against the likes of City and Liverpool and possibly chelsea. But that’s fine, we should be fun to watch and take more than our share of the points in the other 32 games.

 

I don’t understand what Slav sees in Vietto. He brings very little. If we’re not expecting to win, why not put Bryan in at left back and let young Sess express himself?

Christie and Seri had tough matches, but they will get better.

Too many wasted balls. Needed more movement and options. If Seri had had more options, he wouldn’t have looked as bad as he did.

 

My major takeaway from the game is I'd like to know who the announcers were (missed the names) because they immediately rose to the top of my Most Annoying Announcer ratings. It's way too much like watching the Sacramento Kings on one of the rare times they get on national television and the announcers forget there are two teams playing, or they cover it like it's the Globetrotters against the Washington Generals.

I thought it was a good test against one of the top teams. It showed there are some areas for improvement, which is not at all surprising. I was hoping for better, but I'm not really discouraged. I was much more annoyed with the bozo announcers.

 

The announcers certainly sounded like a couple of fanboys who thought that if you didn't immediately stand back and bow down to Pep and his boys then you were disrespecting them and football in general. At least save the criticism regarding the style of play until it leads to relegation (which it won't).

I've liked what I've seen from Vietto in general. He brings energy and movement and gets involved in the play. I like Sess too, but there are long stretches where I feel like Sess just disappears (though he usually pops back up just in time to knock in a parried shot). However, I don't feel like any options would have seen much play today. Mitro had maybe 10 touches (35 according to whoscored.com, the lowest of the players who played the full 90), Schurrle gets muscled off the ball all the time, and Vietto was mostly absent.

I was mostly upset today with the high number of unforced errors and malaise off the ball. There were far too many missed passes - goal kicks going straight out of bounds (Bettinelli had 48.5% pass success), players turning to break then passing the ball behind their streaking teammate, or lazy passes that were easily intercepted. I also saw too many people not moving their feet but motioning to the player with the ball to pass it backwards. The players should be moving to space to give their teammates options.

Unfortunately these are the frustrations of being back in the Premier League, but it's still better than hosting the likes of Nottingham Forest.

 

So I haven't posted anything in as long as I can remember, but the commentators today drove me crazy. Slavisa knew how he wanted to play today and I'm sure he expected a similar result. This game was about building a better team for the rest of the year, today was just part of the process. Whatever doesn't kill you can only make you stronger.

 

It is sad that it seemed like Fulham didn't play their best on a day when they needed to. It may have also been that Fulham made similar errors in other matches but didn't have them exposed so dramatically as City was able to do. Onward and upward.

 

If you are up for some additional abuse, ManCity.com has 9 minutes of highlights available: https://www.mancity.com/citytv/match-highlights/2018/september/man-city-v-fulham-extended-highlights

Hey, FulhamFC.com, don't you want to emulate the big clubs? Wouldn't it be nice to share with the world GJ's take on the match rather than keeping him locked behind a paywall?

 

I am totally here for all the commentator bashing. It's one thing to be belittled, for announcers to show ignorance of smaller side and resort to cliches. That's almost expected.

But what the heck was that? I was wondering what planet the color commentator was on.

To use a college football analogy, it was if he wondered why a team like Ole Miss wasn't able to stop Alabama's offense.

 

According to this, the announcers were Gary Taphouse and Keith Andrews. I haven't been following the Premier League for a few, let's call it 4 seasons so I'm not familiar with the two or their tendencies. I hope we don't have to deal with them again, even if it's Fulham hosting Cardiff City.