Fulham at Aston Villa

Fulham travels to the Midlands on Tuesday to take on high-flying Aston Villa. The match will be on Peacock with kickoff at 2:45pm EDT.

I'm not sure if Villa fans will thank Fulham for the 3-0 defeat they received at the Cottage (remember Luiz "headbuts" Mitrovic, gets a red card when the game is 1-0 in the second half), but after that loss Gerrard was sacked and everything has been going great for them since then! They had 6 losses in their first 11 matches of the season, but only 5 losses in the 21 matches since facing Fulham. They went from 17th place, 3 points off the bottom of the table, to now 6th place and looking toward Europe. It has been the turnaround of the season. In the last nine matches they are undefeated with 7 wins and just 3 goals conceded.

Despite all that recent success, I think Fulham wins. In their current 9-game undefeated streak their 7 wins came against:

• Everton
• Crystal Palace
• Bournemouth
• Chelsea
• Leicester
• Nottingham Forest
• Newcastle

Of those, only the Newcastle win was truly impressive and over the weekend against Brentford they looked pretty ordinary. They are also dealing with a number of injury concerns while Fulham is in pretty good shape - they just don't have their top scorer. Fulham will need to shut down Watkins and keep scoring with guys who's last names don't start with "M", but I think they can do it.

 

Yeah, that was weird. And disappointing. Now a video of stuff that happened in the match (saying "highlights" is too generous for this snoozer):


Did I say that Fulham was injury free? Well so much for that. Willian was a late scratch and Solomon did not look ready to play - he was just off today in his worst performance for Fulham. Then Wilson goes down and suddenly the attacking front is nothing like we've seen the past two weeks.

Some of the team may be on the beach already. Ream had one of his sloppiest performances. Then there was one point where James had a nice breakaway down the left wing, but he needed someone in the box, but no one was there. I don't know where Pereira was - Reed was closest, but he was just jogging down the pitch rather than charging into the box. I'd like to give credit to the Aston Villa defense, but I'm not sure Fulham really made them work to hard today.

 

We were bad. This was the worst performance I've seen from Fulham since our exit from Carabao Cup. No desire, toothless, despite the many fouls--most of the fouls were lazy. But we improved after Crawley Town so perhaps there is hope of a revival before the season's end. On the other hand, we have a thin squad, and now have lost Willian and Wilson (I hope not for long). Mitro is out for another few games. Kebano is only good for a few minutes. And it seems like everyone else is simply worn out physically and mentally. When we bring on Vinicius to solve an attacking problem, and it appears to be the best of the available solutions, it is pretty clear we don't have enough quality players sharing the load and pushing for starting roles. Summer recruiting will be key.

 

Our xG for the game was 0.1. I need to do some research the last time we were that poor going forward.

One positive is I think our defense was actually fairly decent? I feel like on another day this match ends 0-0 and we burn the tape and never mention it again.

 

Yeah, I think that match was the poster child for a "comfortable" Aston Villa victory.