Speaking ahead of Saturday afternoon’s crunch tie with local rivals Queens Park Rangers, Fulham Manager Martin Jol can envisage no better place than Loftus Road to improve the Team's away form.
“It’s a good derby game and it’s probably a bigger game now than the Chelsea game,” Jol said in his pre-match press conference on Thursday afternoon. “We will have a lot of supporters there and we’ll focus on that and we’ll focus on our away form which is not great so hopefully we can change that.
“If you look at it positively, we didn’t lose six out of 12 [games away from home] but that’s not the best away form in the league and hopefully we can change that and make it a structural thing to win away games. We spoke about that, we had a meeting about all these things that we have to focus on; we set new targets and QPR is one of them.”
There were concerns that new signing Pavel Pogrebnyak may not recover in time for the match after picking up a knock in the victory over Stoke a fortnight ago, but Jol was quick to make assurances that our new number seven will be ready for his first London derby.
“He is fit to play,” Jol confirmed. “Hopefully he will keep playing as he is, score some goals and hopefully score on Saturday. He scored in his first game after 18 minutes and it’s always nice to see a player come in and do the business in his first game.”
The 2-1 victory over Stoke was the first of several games against teams in close proximity to Fulham in the table and Jol acknowledges the importance of the current spate of matches.
“I feel the next five games are the most important,” he admitted. “The first target is to get 40 points and then the next target is to establish ourselves in the top ten and hopefully we’ll manage to do that.”