Fulham vs. Birmingham City

Fulham gets their first shot at getting a double on a team when they host Birmingham City on Tuesday. The match will start at 2:45pm EST and will only be available on FFCTV.

In their September matchup Fulham struggled a little with Birmingham, but still managed to build a 4-0 lead before Troy Deeney finally scored on a PK in the 87th minute. If Fulham could win 4-1 when Birmingham statistically played about even with Fulham, it is tempting to imagine what would happen if Fulham put in a dominant performance. Birmingham City have been outscored 21 to 6 in their matches against teams in the top half of the table, they haven't won since November, and their recent form is equal to Reading's. Deeney will also be unavailable due to injury. With Fulham's demolishing of Reading and Bristol City and the state of Birmingham everything is ripe for a... frustrating draw!

Hopefully I'm just being overly pessimistic and Fulham cruises to another win. This match will temporarily put Fulham level on games played with Bournemouth and Blackburn and it would be nice to see a four point gap at the top of the table.

 

Another win on paper, but they play the matches for a reason. Though this little snippet of an interview with Birmingham’s boss is certainly telling.

https://www.joe.co.uk/sport/the-mom...-when-he-hears-fulham-beat-bristol-6-2-311772

 

19 goals in three matches. That’s pretty good.

 

I saw that as well and thought, well, he’ll park the bus a bit. Nope.

 

what a run this is. you want them to get a break and rest and then again, you don't ever want to lose this momentum!

 

I would not have laid a bet that Fulham would score 6 goals and Mitro would not be on the score sheet.

Let the good time roll!

Edited: Just noticed that Wilson wasn't on the score sheet either.

 

Here are the short Fulham highlights, but keep an eye out because Birmingham City is one of those clubs that does longer highlights so we should have those soon:


19 goals in three games over eight days. Just crazy. As the game was winding down I jokingly thought "Well, we've got to worry about Fulham because they aren't scoring like they used to!" but then Robinson fired in number six during injury time to ensure the same score line as the last match.

It feels like Fulham alumnus and current Birmingham keeper, Neil Etheridge, should have done a little better with some of those shots, but even an excellent performance wouldn't have changed the end result. Birmingham managed to limit Mitrovic's chances, but this team is so talented that Carvalho and Kebano just took care of business instead. Birmingham only got their scores when Fulham let up a little - Cairney should have put pressure on the shooter or headed the ball away rather than ducking on the first shot and on the second goal Fulham had just turned over the ball because three guys in white thought another guy in white had it. As soon as Birmingham got their second it was like Fulham just decided to score again to make sure they didn't entertain any ideas of a comeback.

This team seems unstoppable right now, but these past three matches have been against lesser talent so this weekend's match against Stoke will an interesting measure of how good these guys are.

 

Here are the Birmingham highlights. They show more of the match, especially the build-up to the goals, but you'll only get to see replays of the Birmingham goals.

 

Some more good video from Birmingham. These aren't highlights per se, but it does include game footage that they shot from the Putney End and some nice pre-match footage of the Cottage. It does give great views of Kebano's goal and Carvalho's first goal. Thanks Blues! I wish Fulham did stuff like this too:

 

It's interesting that Mitrovic retrieved the ball after every Fulham goal.

 

Blackburn suffered a shocking 2-0 defeat at the hands of Hull so Fulham stays 5 points ahead. There was some terrible officiating in that match went against Blackburn, but I'll still take the result.