Window of Opportunity

Fulhamfc.com sat down with Manager Roy Hodgson on Thursday afternoon to discuss the Club's work during the summer transfer window.

With the transfer window closed once again you must be very satisfied with a successful summer of business…

I think what I’m most happy about is that we’ve changed the squad around and we’ve got a small squad now, a squad that we really believe in and is well-balanced.

When I came in January we really had far too many players and lots of them just trebling or quadrupling up for positions, never getting a game and obviously costing the Club a lot of money, but not playing any football.

Whereas now, with a squad of only 23 players, of which three are goalkeepers, it will give the younger players, like Milsom and Brown, a chance to push forward and show what they can do in the First Team squad.

It will give the players on the fringes a greater chance of playing, and although the squad is at the limit in terms of size, at least it’s full of the right type of players that we want to be at the Club and not just players that one has inherited and that are here really by default rather than anything else.

A feature of the window is that clubs tend to trade right up until the deadline, and Fulham were no different in that regard…

We weren’t looking to do an awful lot of business on the last day. We had been interested in a central midfield player, a defensive type, big, strong and athletic, and Dickson Etuhu was on our radar for quite some time so when we had the chance of getting him that was the important target.

Julian Gray was a last minute one, he became available and he fills a gap in our squad that we didn’t have when Bouazza and Cook were here, but with Bouazza and Cook both going out on loan we were really short of a left-sided wide midfield player to cover the wide midfield players we have in Gera, Davies and Dempsey, so I thought that was important.

We would probably have been interested in adding to the squad with another defender if we’d have found someone who was good enough to come in, but only as a cover player because we’re happy with the back four we have, but that didn’t materialise.

And the same thing with a forward, if someone had come up who was worth taking a chance on. But we never had the intention of going out and spending a lot more money. The idea was that if there was another loan player like Julian, or a player like Dickson who we could get for a relatively small amount of money then maybe we would have, but we intentionally did our main business in the transfer market very early on.

So now you’re satisfied with the quality and balance of the squad?

Twenty seven players have left the Club since I came in, most of them at the end of last season or during the summer window. Some have only left on loan of course because we don’t want to lose them, we just want them to get some experience – people like Eddie Johnson in particular - but we’ve only actually brought in, I think, 11 in this transfer window, added to the four that we brought in January.

So we’re 12 players down from when I started, and that’s much better for people like Robert Milsom and Wayne Brown, because it means they train with the First Team regularly, whereas when you’ve got 30-odd senior players on your books, every day the training groups are well over 20.

As a result it’s much harder to bring those younger players up. Now we’re very happy to have those players around to make a squad of 18 and I think it’s going to be good for their development, because they deserve to be in the First Team squad because of the quality they posses.

Now all we need is to get all of that squad back from international duty in one piece…

That’s the problem with international matches, especially when you have so many players away on duty. This week the training has been rather strange because we’ve had so few senior players. There were a couple more today with Konchesky and Andy Johnson joining in for the first time since they’ve been working hard on their injuries.

They’ve been fit for a while, Andy in particular, but we’ve been wary of throwing them in, but those two added to our group today. However, if you take out Rob Milsom and Wayne Brown, there were only really four, possibly five senior players here.

We’ll get some back on Monday and then we’ll have eight or nine senior players in, but then we’ll have to wait until Thursday for the others and just hope they come back fit and free from any minor injuries that would rule them out for the Bolton game.