Fulham at Swansea

Fulham has the first of three critical away games in an eight day stretch when they travel to face Swansea. The match kicks off on FFCTV at 2:45pm EST.

@jumpkutz said in a prior post that it might still be too early to talk about promotion as a certainty. The next three matches will have a big impact on whether Fulham is sweating it out as the season closes. Fulham's April schedule is brutal and getting maximum points in March would relieve the pressure. In April and May Fulham will face eight teams, and only one of those Fulham has beaten so far this season (QPR). Six of those teams are averaging 1.5 PPM or more and only Derby isn't making a push for the playoffs. It couldn't be a more difficult stretch to close the season. Meanwhile Fulham has already beaten their remaining four March opponents. If Fulham were to get the same results against the final 12 opponents as they did the first half of the season they would get 20 more points to end with 93 - probably enough to win the league and certainly enough to get promoted. That tally assumes four straight wins. If Fulham has a bobble over the next couple matches the April lineup will look even more threatening.

So, time to focus on Swansea! The Swans come into this match looking to get three wins in a row for the first time this season. They can also have some confidence that they can get results against tougher teams at home after beating both Huddersfield and Blackburn when they came to visit. One advantage for Fulham is that loanee Cyrus Christie won't be able to play for Swansea. He has played the vast majority of minutes since arriving in Wales and has scored twice and assisted once. Fulham should be healthy coming into this one, but we could see some player rotation with four matches coming over 12 days.

Mitrovic got one of his first half hat tricks in the first meeting with Swansea. Hopefully he can get on track against the Swans again since he didn't get to score on Saturday - only the third win this season when Mitro didn't score.

 

COYW!!!!

 

I'm hoping we've fallen into a "taking care of business" mode that allows us to get three points without necessarily playing very well. We've been better than decent on the road this season, so this stretch of away fixtures shouldn't deter us from keeping our stranglehold on the top spot. Our only real worry should be a spate of injuries to key people. We've got strong backups, but you don't want to rely solely on them for the rest of the season. Although we don't have any cup competitions to cause any squad issues, I'd just as soon have Mitro, Wilson, Kebano, Carvalho, Tosin, Robinson, Tete, Cairney, Seri, Reed, Reid, O'Bryan, Rodak, Ream and Rodak fit and available for the next 12 league outings. That's not too much to ask, is it? I agree Micah. If we make it through April in basically the same, or better, position than we are currently, I'll be far less prone to ulcers by the time Derby Day here in Louisville rolls around, the same day we should put a nice bow on a promotion season at Bramall Lane.

 

I'll be interested in the stats for this match. These are the top two teams with regards to possession and pass accuracy. In the first match at the Cottage, the Swans maintained 62% ball possession but were outshot by Fulham 10-7 (7-1 for on target shots). If Swansea maintain the possession advantage again, let's just hope that Fulham repeat their effective shooting.

Same lineup as Saturday so Fulham is fielding their best again.

 

The highlights (might have extended highlights from Swansea later):


There is only one highlight from the first half - the red card foul on Wilson. This is kind of sad because the first half was a tense affair between two evenly matched sides. Fulham didn't get a reasonable look at goal until almost 30 minutes was gone. Swansea was dominating possession and making it very hard for Fulham to keep the ball by always making sure every Fulham player had a defender glued to them. Once the red card was pulled out that game plan had to go out the window. I kind of wanted to see how Fulham would adjust in the second half to break down a Swansea team that played like Fulham's equal, but the red card made sure that Fulham would have the advantage in the second half. Swansea ended up handing the match to Fulham between the red, the failure to play up from the back on the first goal, and the own goal on the second score - after that it was game over and Fulham barely had to do anything.

I was surprised that the red card was shown. At first glance I thought it was a yellow for sure, but not a red. However after seeing the replay it does seem like it was probably deserved.

I was shocked at how Swansea fell to pieces immediately in the second half. They had been so secure in possession in the first half that I thought they had a good shot at earning a draw even being down a man. Then they just gifted Fulham the ball and Mitrovic made them pay.

The highlight for the night was Neco William's second goal - the best was saved for last. Just wow. What a volley!

In other matches both Blackburn and Bournemouth had draws. Fulham now has a 14 point gap over second and third place.

 

And here are those extended highlights from Swansea:


Credit to the Swansea announcers - they didn't complain too much about the red after seeing the replay.

 

I thought it was a 50-50 call on the red card. Most refs, I think, would probably have been more lenient in that instance, but he had a pretty good look, so you gotta believe it was the right call. In the second half, I couldn't help but think Swansea looked a lot like us during our most recent Premier League campaigns (even without being a man down). Once the floodgates opened, the goals would start to come in bunches, except, usually, much earlier in the first half. The play that led to the opener looked so, so familiar: a poor first distributing pass by the keeper to a teammate in a vulnerable position right in front of goal. Then an unsurprising mishandle of said pass, a quick turnover and BAM! A gift concession. Yes, they took it to us until the red card. But that's football. And Lord knows, it's happened to us on more than a few occasions in recent seasons. Under Parker, I'm not sure we would have jumped on them as quickly and decisively as we did. That we did speaks volumes about our intent, talent and belief under Silva that we can do exactly that. And we did...and that's very gratifying. They might have thought they were back in it after making it 3-1, but we came right back, put our foot on their neck and kept it there. You have to be able to do that at this level. We can, and we did, and I love it.
On to Oakwell! (and another brutally early start for our west coast friend SoCalJoe...more coffee?)

 

It was nice to Fulham’s killer instinct kick in after the red card was given.

 

I thought this picture from BBC was pretty telling - studs up, nowhere near the ball, catching Wilson above the ankle.

From the sound of it, I’m glad I wasn’t watching. I probably would’ve gotten frustrated by the evenness of the match and lack of Fulham chances. I’m happy to see Williams open his account, especially after just missing in the last match. As has been pointed out by others, I also enjoy that this team doesn’t let up and doesn’t get conservative. They play their game until the final whistle blows.

Fulham now only need to average 1 goal per match for the rest of the season to hit 100 and break Reading’s Championship record. This is truly a remarkable season for the club.

 

The magic number for winning both promotion and the title is decreasing rapidly. Rapidly becoming a manner of when not if:

 

The post shared by Timmy shows things looking really positive for Fulham - and those points are a worst case scenario. The reality is that Fulham will need far fewer than 26 points for the league title.

One thing I did was look at the remaining points per match needed to get to the typical level for winning the league (94) and for winning automatic promotion (88).

PPM Needed to 94 Points:

• Fulham: 1.6 PPM
  
• Bournemouth: 2.5 PPM
• Huddersfield: 3.2 PPM

PPM Needed for 88 Points:

• Fulham: 1.1 PPM
• Bournemouth: 2 PPM
• Huddersfield: 2.6 PPM
• Sheffield United and Luton Town: 2.8 PPM
• Blackburn: 3 PPM

Please note that it is impossible to get more than 3 PPM so the league title is essentially between Fulham and Bournemouth barring a big collapse from both of them.

Fulham's PPM for the season is 2.2 and over the last eight matches is 2.4. If we look at the first half results from the remaining 11 teams for Fulham they got 1.5 PPM. Neither Bournemouth or Huddersfield have a PPM rate over the season or over the last eight matches or against their remaining opponents that is high enough to get to even 88 points. This likely means that the bar for automatic promotion will be lower - possibly around 85 points - which makes automatic promotion even more likely for Fulham.

The bottom line is that the only way for Fulham not to get automatic promotion at this point is for two things to happen: First, Fulham would have to have their worst form of the season over the remaining matches (an outside possibility given the stiff competition in April). Second, Bournemouth and Huddersfield would both need to be in their best form of the season. Huddersfield might be up to the task, but Bournemouth does not appear to be.

Fulham still needs to get a few more positive results, but as @timmyg said, it is a matter of when and not if.

 

I'd still like to get through these last two matches in March before the WC qualifiers break before chilling the champagne. But I gotta admit, it looks awfully darn good. Micah's numbers look very good and, at the end of the day, that's where the rubber meets the road. Bad stuff can and does happen, but I just don't see any scenario, much like Evan, Timmy and Micah have already eloquently stated, whereby we just screw the pooch. It's really time to kind of sit back and enjoy watching this team do their thing. When you win 1-nil or 7-nil or 5-1 or 3-1 or 7-2 or whatever, winning cures all ills. The bonus for us is that it's oh so fun to WATCH! That means a lot...