Are We Sparta F.C.?

Against Wolves last Sunday, Fulham contrived another depressingly anaemic performance.

Being organised is honourable, but at times the players displayed the desire of automatons. Roy’s robots. And, having been excused Europa League exertions, they were unable to blame Trans-Europe excess for the lack of both craft and work that they were guilty of.

It was heartening, at least, when Roy Hodgson, subverting his benign uncle image somewhat, delivered an unusually explicit autopsy regarding the shortcomings of the team via his post-match interview.

He related how the entire team, apart from John Paintsil, had been spared the trip to Bulgaria the previous Thursday, and had instead spent all week “preparing to play against Wolves”. Unusually, he even opted to single out specific errors by Hangeland and Dempsey that led to the goals, something he rarely relies upon.

From a typically restrained man, such comments suggest he was seething. If he opts to exercise his irritability when he reassembles the culprits on the training pitch, a positive change should result.

Jah Wobble, ex-PIL bass-playing explorer and disarmingly erudite geezer, once suggested that if he ever managed a Premiership team, he would “car bomb” what he saw as overpaid, over-indulged players, and force the rest into barracks on starvation wages. They would “live more like warrior poets”, he insists, “and they’d have to study Plato.”

I’d certainly be interested in the effects of such an austere regimen on the Gucci washbag brigade.

Alternatively, Roy could grant the so-called ‘second string’ team who themselves, it seems, made like warriors against Man City’s opulent eleven in Wednesday’s Carling Cup elimination, the right to enlist the first-teamers as their slaves for a week or so.

“Hey, Bobby, fetch me my copy of The Republic…once you’ve finished cleaning my boots, that is.”