By Geoff Pruce

Fulham’s position in the top half of the table is even more reason to keep our eye on the ball, according to Andreas Pereira.

Five wins and four draws from our opening 15 matches sees the Whites just two points off the European places, and while Andreas admits not many may have predicted that back in August, he knows it must serve as motivation to keep the momentum up.

“If you would say this before the season, that we’re going to be ninth, I would say that would be difficult, with a lot of big clubs in the Premier League,” he said. “But we worked hard for it, and it’s paid off.

Andreas Pereira waves to his family following Fulham's match against Everton

“Yeah we’ve done well, and we have to keep improving every day. I think the most important thing is to be at the same level that we started with.

“The difficult part of the season starts now and we have to show our character and not relax. We have to keep pushing.

“When I signed at Fulham, everyone was just, ‘We don’t want to get relegated, we want to stay in the Premier League.’

“That’s something that’s really important for the Club, and for the players. We are ninth but the first thing is we don’t want to go down, we want to stay in the Premier League, and after that we will see where we get.”

Andreas Pereira battles with Lisandro Martinez

After Fulham’s hard fought battle with Manchester United back in mid-November, Marco Silva granted his squad a fortnight off – a welcome respite for Andreas who, with the way the Brazilian season ran through the summer, has had a relentless 2022.

“I played my 50th game [this year], the last game against United, so I was really tired and it came at the right moment,” he explained. “I had two weeks of just relaxing and charging all the batteries.

“We had two weeks off but we’ve been back training for three weeks. We’re going to play our first game on the 26th, so it feels like we’ve done another pre-season.

“We’re preparing ourselves again, so it was a bit of a strange feeling having the World Cup in the middle of the season.”