There have been bigger and more scandalous falls from grace in English football but Fulham’s recent descent has still been remarkable. So emphatically has the club dropped that it is easy to forget the Cottagers were a Premier League stalwart for over a decade until last season’s fiasco of a campaign concluded with relegation.
While their standing of only two spots above the Championship relegation zone before Friday night’s visit of promotion-chasing Bournemouth suggests Fulham are bouncing back about as convincingly as Alan Partridge did, their manager, Kit Symons, believes the club is on the up and could return to the big time. “The table just doesn’t look nice at the moment,” he says. “We need to get off our backsides and do it.”
There was no doubt the club seemed to be doing that when Symons first took charge this season. The former Fulham player and academy coach replaced Felix Magath in mid-September after the eccentric German followed on from last season’s demotion by mustering only one win in Fulham’s first eight matches. They promptly won five of nine during Symons’s caretaker reign, a run that led to the 43-year-old being appointed on a full-time basis in October. However, results have deteriorated since then and Fulham went into last Saturday’s match against Derby County on a worse winless streak than the one under Magath earlier in the campaign.
With discontent simmering among some sections of the crowd, the club’s owner, the American businessman Shahid Khan, felt it necessary to make a public declaration of support for Symons. “We’ve become a more cohesive club, on and off the pitch, since Kit was promoted to manager,” said Khan. “I’m confident we’ll finish the season safe, sound and strong.” Fulham duly beat Derby to record their first win in nine matches and though they then lost 1-0 to Watford on Tuesday, Symons feels they are righting themselves after their downturn.
“I certainly galvanised things when I first took over,” he says. “I got everyone together, which was very important. The results went very well initially and then sort of plateaued and now we’re having a tough spell but I think overall things have gone in the right sort of direction. Building takes time … If I’m given enough, with the people I’ve got around me, we’ll do well at this club for sure.”
Symons inherited a mishmash of players that reflected the confusion of the previous year, when three different managers recruited and tweaked tactics without any clear plan emerging. Symons has had to make sense of a squad consisting of veterans of questionable worth, journeymen of no fixed prowess and youngsters with plenty of promise but little battle-hardness.
Some supporters had suggested that relegation might at least have offered the advantage of giving the club’s talented young players a chance to replace over-rated senior pros, but it has become clear that most are not yet ready to lead a successful promotion campaign. The teenage forwards Patrick Roberts and Moussa Dembélé made their debuts while the club was still in the Premier League but have rarely started this season and have not yet looked ready for a regular starting place ahead of Ross McCormack, Hugo Rodallega or Bryan Ruiz, who has performed well since his proposed January transfer to Levante fell through.
The only one of the club’s youngsters to establish himself as a regular starter this season is 20-year-old Lasse Vigen Christensen, who has shown unusual maturity and power in midfield, often alongside Scott Parker, who remains, according to Symons, an “inspirational” figure at the club. Kostas Stafylidis, a 21-year-old on loan from Bayer Leverkusen, has become a fixture at left-back in a defence marshalled by the 28-year-old Bulgarian Nikolay Bodurov. A formula has been found.
“We were so young when I first took over and had so little experience that I had to try and get the experienced players in and find a system that suited them,” explains Symons. “That certainly worked initially and then we played fairly narrow at times and teams were finding out about that and exposed us a little bit in wide areas. But we’ve adjusted how we play and our defensive shape. It’s taken a lot of work on the training field and a lot of video analysis with the players but they’ve taken it on board and now, in the last two games, defensively our shape is now looking a lot more solid and stronger.”
Fulham are accused of overplaying and being too cautious, with fans baying for the team to attack more during Tuesday’s defeat at Watford. Some supporters are frustrated that Matt Smith, the 6ft 6in striker, has made only one start since returning from his loan stint at Bristol City in January. Symons says the directness that Smith offers is an option that will be used throughout the rest of the season and maintains the side is generally getting things right going forward.
“One of the other things we had to address was that we had a lot possession but were not getting enough shots or crosses,” he says of this season’s rebuilding. “But we had more shots and crosses and possession than Watford so we’re creating chances, playing good football and defending pretty well overall so those are big improvements. But ultimately it needs to be linked to getting the three points.”
The rebuilding is far from finished. However, Symons says that if he is allowed to pursue it over the summer, Fulham could challenge for promotion next season. “That’s not unrealistic at all, that’s what our aim would be,” he says. “This group have come a long way and have improved a lot. There will be comings and goings in the summer without a shadow of a doubt. It’s going to be an ongoing rebuilding process and looking to the future.”
