Front Runners

Roy Hodgson has been pleased with the improvement in Fulham's attacking game in recent weeks and the Manager believes the strikers on the Club's books can provide the firepower to secure Fulham's Premier League status.

“A team that doesn’t score many goals will always be tending to rotate strikers to try and find the right man. Of course McBride was virtually out from the beginning until now. We’ve been fairly stable in our choices.

“We haven’t chopped and changed too much but we’ve got quite a lot of strikers at the Club. They all want to play and they’re all committed to the task so it’s fairly obvious that when we aren’t scoring enough goals they will get chances.

“I think creating goal scoring opportunities is an area that has improved over the last few weeks and I hope that improvement will continue and give us further momentum. I’m quite confident that the strikers we have at the Club at the moment can help us in that respect.

“Certainly on the training field I see their enthusiasm, energy and motivation. I do know that they’re all good enough players to score goals given the chance.

One player who has yet to feature is Jari Litmanen. The Finnish forward played for the Reserves against Spurs earlier this week and despite his injury frustrations, is now ready to compete for a place on the bench amongst a healthy looking squad.

“Jari is ready for the bench but my problem is quite a few players are ready for the bench. He played very well in the Reserves this week which is good. He’s training well and he’s a very good player to have around.

“He’s an inspiration to everybody. His quality, professionalism and attitude to training – I’m delighted to have him here. He’s a quality football player.”