With the Team having attained the second highest finish in the Club’s history last season, Stephen Kelly looked back on the campaign and cited the squad’s mental strength as a core factor in achieving eighth place.
“I think we started off pretty well and we were pretty much unbeatable in the first 8 games of the season which obviously was an impressive start but we weren’t really getting the wins,” Kelly told fulhamfc.com.
“We were defending well but weren’t really getting the goals and after that having a lot of draws caused us problems and coming up to Christmas time we were a bit unsure about how things were going because we hadn’t got the wins that we probably deserved and we were hovering around that relegation battle.
“But I think that everyone here was confident and knew that that wasn’t going to be the case at the end of the season because of the squad that we had and because of the way we performed it was never going to be a problem for us; we were looking up into the top half of the table.
“It’s a test of mental strength when it is like that. You are performing well and you’re not getting the results that you deserve and you are picking up so many draws and we weren’t getting beaten; it was just the draws causing us problems.
“We turned that around, we started to win games and score more goals towards the second half of the season which pushed us up towards the top of the table. Overall, I think that it was a little topsy-turvy but in the end we really showed our true colours and came to the top like we should have done.”