Stoke City arrive at Craven Cottage on Saturday on the back of somewhat patchy form but Martin Jol expects nothing less than a hard-fought contest against a team who are still competing in three major competitions.
“They’ve had four wins away from home,” Jol explained. “They’re quite a consistent team who don’t score a lot of goals but they score goals at the right times. They are doing a terrific job and are in Europe as well which is not easy I can tell you. So it’s a strong team but of course we’ve got home advantage and we really want the points.”
Any game with Stoke poses teams a different type of threat with the style that Tony Pulis has his side playing but Jol believes his Team are sufficiently prepared.
“Of course Stoke is different with the throw ins and the set plays so we have to come up with a couple of answers and if we do that I think we’ve got a good chance to play our football and to take our style to them,” said Jol.
“You have to focus on your own game as well but of course we’ve got players with the size and the quality to cope with the weapon of long balls and throw-ins.”
The next two months will see Fulham come up against a variety of teams currently residing in close proximity in the Barclays Premier League table – circumstances which Martin Jol sees as an ideal opportunity to climb the rankings.
“We want to get an even bigger gap between us and the bottom three and hopefully we can do that in the matches against the teams around us,” admitted Jol. “It’s a challenge because we haven’t done that before, we’ve been quite inconsistent. But on the other hand we’ve got nine draws which is pretty consistent but I still feel that there were five or six of those that we should have won. If we would have done that, scored more goals at the right moment, we would have been in a terrific position.”
Tickets are now on General Sale for Saturday's Barclays Premier League match against Stoke City at Craven Cottage (KO 3pm).|