Undoubtedly one of the biggest challenges faced by many Premiership defences this season has been that of keeping Manchester United’s potent attacking unit under control. The Red Devils are by far and away this season’s top scoring side, having netted nearly 20 goals more than their nearest competitors. So for Carlos Bocanegra and co. last Saturday’s encounter against the title-chasers was always going to be a hard day at the office.
Whilst the 2-1 scoreline may have not made pretty reading, the narrow nature of the defeat told a different story. But for a late piece of individual magic from Cristiano Ronaldo, the Whites would have been looking at a share of the spoils. “But I guess that’s why he gets paid the big bucks,” Bocanegra quipped, looking back on the Portuguese winger’s match-winning strike.
Indeed, having kept United largely at bay for most of the match, conceding in the final two minutes was “kind of a heartbreaker” for Fulham’s American central defender.
“They’re a great team and they have a lot of individuals who can change a game,” he told fulhamfc.com. “A couple of people said that for us to get a result we’d have to be playing at our best and hopefully they wouldn’t have such a good game. It was going that way for a while, then they had one little glimpse and that’s that.
“It was hard to lose so late in the game. We’ve been doing that to quite a few teams this season, scoring late on. It was difficult to take because we played well enough to get a point, we could have even got all three points.”
Attention now turns to next Saturday’s sell-out match against Martin O’Neill’s Aston Villa|. On countless occasions this season Fulham Manager, Chris Coleman, has stressed the importance of beating sides in and around the Whites and this weekend’s clash at the Cottage looks set to be a prime example of just such a match.
Notwithstanding Villa’s game in hand over the Whites, both sides have identical Premiership records so Saturday’s match really will be a six-pointer.
“They’re going to work hard but this is a game we need to win,” said Bocanegra. “We need to put the Manchester United match behind us, we played well but we need to keep the consistency going and this is a game we have to take three points from. It would have been great to beat United but games against sides like Aston Villa are the ones we need to win.”
