You may have heard of the Bobby Moore Fund dinner which happened recently? Well, we’ve just found out that it raised almost £200,000, which is absolutely fantastic. It was great to see Fulham had representation at the event with the Club buying a table, because not every side did. West Ham didn’t, for example. There was a few ex-Fulham people there in addition to the table – myself, Roy Hodgson and Les Strong, so it was a great evening with a lot of Fulham!
Looking back on recent games, we had a nasty run of fixtures between these two international breaks. The Spurs game was always going to be a difficult one, and we ended up giving them a hand with both goals. In fairness to our guys at the back, though, it is tough playing with two left footed centre-halves. Strangely, it’s much harder than with two right footers – I think because there are more right footed defenders in the game, so they’re more used to playing as a left centre-back, rather than the other way round. To give credit to Spurs, they were defending high up the pitch, and obviously did us on a couple of occasions.
Brighton is a tough place to go, so we can be very happy with getting a draw down there. You know you're going to give up lots of possession, and when you're looking at the last couple of seasons, you don’t look at Brighton away and consider it one where many teams will get much out of. The season before we nicked it late on with a Manor Solomon goal – a result which maybe we didn’t deserve. This was a fair result for us really, though, as we came back really strong in the second half after giving up a lot of possession in the first, and that’s a good point there.
Manchester United was an absolute sickener. I was watching the game live and I thought that when we got into our stride, we were the better team. The winning goal was a real sucker-punch, with a lot of mistakes all in the same passage of play. Even at the end, Bernd Leno – who’s a top class ‘keeper – I think he will say that he maybe should have kept the shot out as well. It was a shame, because we had some really good opportunities, so when Marco came away from that game he won’t believe that we lost to Man United, and that probably actually we deserved all three points. But he’ll look at the performance and think that we went toe to toe with them, if not the better team, and we were unlucky.
Sunday saw us go to Villa, who are a good side at the moment, and we were the 13th side they’ve beaten on the trot at home. On paper that was always going to be a really difficult game, and it was in the end. It was at least good to see Raúl Jiménez getting his goal, hopefully that gives him confidence. When you're playing a game like that, 3-0 down, and you do get a consolation effort, you want it to go to someone like Raúl, to give him a bit of a pickup.
We did get one victory in this batch of games, though, and Ipswich was a better win than people thought, actually, because they are very high up in the Championship. People will say we should be beating them, but I thought that was a very good result. Now we get to the Quarter-Final stage, where you get a sniff of winning it. There's some big sides playing against each other in the other Quarter-Finals, so obviously two of Liverpool, West Ham, Chelsea and Newcastle are going to get knocked out, so if we get a good result up at Everton, we could get a nice Semi-Final. Then all of a sudden your eyes start getting wider. But the Everton game won’t be an easy one, because their form has picked up significantly since Dominic Calvin-Lewin's come back. I think that's an even money shot, that game, I think both teams will fancy it, and I anticipate both teams putting out strong sides.
We’ve got to be looking at the home games after the internationals for picking up some momentum, as we’re playing Wolves, Nottingham Forest, West Ham and Burnley at the Cottage before Christmas. All those are winnable games, but all those teams will fancy taking points off Fulham as well, so they should make for more entertaining games because if both teams think they can win against each other, it generally opens matches up a little bit.
What good news it is about Jay Stansfield’s England Under-21 call-up. Congratulations to him, and his family as well, because they’ll be loving that news. I was lucky enough to represent England Under-21s as well, which was a big thrill for my family and everyone concerned. Good luck to him. Let’s hope the experience he gains allows him to come back to us and get in the First Team.
