Mr. Paul Doleman, proprietor of the Manchester City blog, Bert Trautmann's Neck, recently invited me to dilate on Fulham, and their imminent rendezvous with his beloved team.
Part One is here.
And Part Two is here.
Friday, 19 March 2010
SW6 Post-Impressionism: Fulham 4 Juventus 1
Just as the analysis of a joke kills it, robs it of its essence, and ultimately suffocates its humour, so I hesitate to dissect this extraordinary game.
I want to enshrine the totality of last night in my mind, to indemnify the texture of the events that infused the concrete details.
Multiple, dispassionate, play-by-play breakdowns are available out there, no doubt. But I don’t wish to lay the bones out on the table in an attempt to understand the inner workings. I’m content with the mystery.
Yes, I was there. I saw Zamora’s indomitable edge. I witnessed Gera’s wiles, and Baird’s central ascendancy. I was charged by Duff’s agile electricity, and heartened by Davies’ mercurial revival. I welcomed the erection of the Hughes-Hangeland Thames Barrier after the early breach.
Yes, I denied Dempsey his audacity when I perceived what he was attempting. I debated it with myself as the ball split the floodlit drizzle, slowly on its way: first I registered its accuracy, then I acknowledged the goalkeeper’s futility, before finally conceding that even the approaching coalition of post and crossbar might not be enough to deny Clint’s vision. I marvelled that a man barely back from traction could burst out of the cocoon of caution inbred by his manager, and manhandle fate in such a way. What of “match sharpness”, and “slowly regaining confidence”? Glib cliches dismissed at will.
For me, this was a triumph of collective endeavour. Hodgson’s doctrine has always instilled transcendence of the team over the individual, sublimation of personal desire for collective good, despite Dempsey’s benign rebellion last night. But here the players appeared, more than ever, to be operating on a single frequency. Undeniably together.
Even before Cannavaro’s demise - and, lets face it, a sending off needn’t be a terminal event, particularly with a two-goal lead - Juventus displayed a stifled vitality. A facsimile of greatness, they appeared to be practising their prowess by rote, in denial of limbs whose muscle memory was appearing increasingly shot. Devoid of inspiration, they were like golden ghosts drifting across the pitch in the rain, phantoms condemned to a seemingly endless dance with their tormentors.
I’ll surely watch the game again and savour the discrete events upon which this victory was constructed, but for now I’m content with the sense impressions.
I’ll remember Roy’s uncharacteristic fist-clench towards the crowd, Baird and Hangeland’s mile-wide smiles, and Davies leaping onto Schwarzer’s back clutching Del Piero’s golden fleece for his spoils.
I’ll remember glancing at the scoreboard as I climbed the steps on the way out. Earlier I’d struggled to fathom those two names together. Now, with the respective scores next to them, it could have been a different language. It was a different language.
I’ll remember walking up Finlay Street and turning to look back at the floodlights backlighting the Cottage, the plumes of rain swirling in their glare and, I swear, lifting slightly off the ground, just for a moment.
So, I’ll leave the executive summaries to others. The debriefs and the detailed inquiries, the tactical appraisals and the critiques. For now, I’m immersing myself in the rapture, mainlining the sensations, and reiterating the emotions.
They’ll sustain me for a long time yet.
I want to enshrine the totality of last night in my mind, to indemnify the texture of the events that infused the concrete details.
Multiple, dispassionate, play-by-play breakdowns are available out there, no doubt. But I don’t wish to lay the bones out on the table in an attempt to understand the inner workings. I’m content with the mystery.
Yes, I was there. I saw Zamora’s indomitable edge. I witnessed Gera’s wiles, and Baird’s central ascendancy. I was charged by Duff’s agile electricity, and heartened by Davies’ mercurial revival. I welcomed the erection of the Hughes-Hangeland Thames Barrier after the early breach.
Yes, I denied Dempsey his audacity when I perceived what he was attempting. I debated it with myself as the ball split the floodlit drizzle, slowly on its way: first I registered its accuracy, then I acknowledged the goalkeeper’s futility, before finally conceding that even the approaching coalition of post and crossbar might not be enough to deny Clint’s vision. I marvelled that a man barely back from traction could burst out of the cocoon of caution inbred by his manager, and manhandle fate in such a way. What of “match sharpness”, and “slowly regaining confidence”? Glib cliches dismissed at will.
For me, this was a triumph of collective endeavour. Hodgson’s doctrine has always instilled transcendence of the team over the individual, sublimation of personal desire for collective good, despite Dempsey’s benign rebellion last night. But here the players appeared, more than ever, to be operating on a single frequency. Undeniably together.
Even before Cannavaro’s demise - and, lets face it, a sending off needn’t be a terminal event, particularly with a two-goal lead - Juventus displayed a stifled vitality. A facsimile of greatness, they appeared to be practising their prowess by rote, in denial of limbs whose muscle memory was appearing increasingly shot. Devoid of inspiration, they were like golden ghosts drifting across the pitch in the rain, phantoms condemned to a seemingly endless dance with their tormentors.
I’ll surely watch the game again and savour the discrete events upon which this victory was constructed, but for now I’m content with the sense impressions.
I’ll remember Roy’s uncharacteristic fist-clench towards the crowd, Baird and Hangeland’s mile-wide smiles, and Davies leaping onto Schwarzer’s back clutching Del Piero’s golden fleece for his spoils.
I’ll remember glancing at the scoreboard as I climbed the steps on the way out. Earlier I’d struggled to fathom those two names together. Now, with the respective scores next to them, it could have been a different language. It was a different language.
I’ll remember walking up Finlay Street and turning to look back at the floodlights backlighting the Cottage, the plumes of rain swirling in their glare and, I swear, lifting slightly off the ground, just for a moment.
So, I’ll leave the executive summaries to others. The debriefs and the detailed inquiries, the tactical appraisals and the critiques. For now, I’m immersing myself in the rapture, mainlining the sensations, and reiterating the emotions.
They’ll sustain me for a long time yet.
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
The Me-Me-Me Meme
Tactically, the constant search for an effective harmony between individuality and team ethics creates an engaging tension. Blending flair with pragmatism is an elusive alchemy.
This can be seen in the non-footballing elements of players' behaviour as well. They clearly want or need to be recognised as individuals, but are inescapably bound to their teammates. Hence, a player makes a personal gesture of some kind, only to see it disappear amongst a mass of imitators within weeks.
Players have been known to instigate some interesting practices when it comes to fashion (the tumescent tie-knot; the distressed denim/sequinned t-shirt faux pas), and they can be endlessly creative with a camcorder and a few chums.
However, despite such lurid invention, they ultimately seek a sense of belonging through identification with their peers, and attain permission for activities via group sanction. Be it the Gucci clutch, the Vicks-splattered patch on the shirt, or the forearms pitted with hieroglyphics, each new affectation sees its imitation spread through the game like a tabloid scandal.
This extends to the goal celebration, too. The somersault, the finger to the lips, the collective rocking of imaginary infants, and, most unwelcome of all, the anus-wiggling, pot-stirring, grind. Carlos Tevez aping Beyoncé? Not in front of the children, thanks.
This last weekend saw the two celebrations reproduced below. My research suggests that Thierry Henry has been doing this one awhile. What can it mean: do they they have a stimulant smudged upon their wrist? Could it be snuff, or an unfinished Fisherman's Friend, perhaps? It's a beguiling enigma, for sure. However, unless informed otherwise, I'm going to presume that this gesture carries no profound meaning whatsoever, and is merely another example of footballing autosuggestion.
This can be seen in the non-footballing elements of players' behaviour as well. They clearly want or need to be recognised as individuals, but are inescapably bound to their teammates. Hence, a player makes a personal gesture of some kind, only to see it disappear amongst a mass of imitators within weeks.
Players have been known to instigate some interesting practices when it comes to fashion (the tumescent tie-knot; the distressed denim/sequinned t-shirt faux pas), and they can be endlessly creative with a camcorder and a few chums.
However, despite such lurid invention, they ultimately seek a sense of belonging through identification with their peers, and attain permission for activities via group sanction. Be it the Gucci clutch, the Vicks-splattered patch on the shirt, or the forearms pitted with hieroglyphics, each new affectation sees its imitation spread through the game like a tabloid scandal.
This extends to the goal celebration, too. The somersault, the finger to the lips, the collective rocking of imaginary infants, and, most unwelcome of all, the anus-wiggling, pot-stirring, grind. Carlos Tevez aping Beyoncé? Not in front of the children, thanks.
This last weekend saw the two celebrations reproduced below. My research suggests that Thierry Henry has been doing this one awhile. What can it mean: do they they have a stimulant smudged upon their wrist? Could it be snuff, or an unfinished Fisherman's Friend, perhaps? It's a beguiling enigma, for sure. However, unless informed otherwise, I'm going to presume that this gesture carries no profound meaning whatsoever, and is merely another example of footballing autosuggestion.
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Wednesday, 30 September 2009
A Season In Hell
In his book, Sum, David Eagleman offers an array of different scenarios describing what might await us in the afterlife (should there be one).
In the first, he suggests that after death we might immediately begin to re-live the life that has just ended, but this time around all common activities would be grouped together and experienced in discrete blocks.
Hence, we would enjoy our entire life’s worth of showers in a single two-hundred-day-long drenching, and then bathe no more. Our lifetime allocation of pain would be endured in one excruciating stretch, and for three years we would do nothing but eat. We would sit at traffic lights, immobile, for six weeks, and for two days do nothing but tie shoelaces. And so on.
Apparently, a high-ranking official at the Premier League is an admirer of Mr. Eagleman’s book, and has become smitten with this notion in particular. In idle moments he is apt to daydream, and has begun to visualise the football season, which resides within his governance, being reorganised in such a way. However, upon receding from his fantastical reveries, and slipping reluctantly back to the intractable, Einstein-ordered world, he glumly acknowledges that such a transformation would require the ability to reconfigure human existence itself, something currently beyond his organisation’s remit.
However, emerging rumours imply that the official in question happened upon one Sepp Blatter in the washroom at an International Football soiree recently and, unable to stifle his vision any longer, confided in the FIFA president. Apparently Mr. Blatter, always enthused by innovation, promised to fully exploit his influence. So, should he manage to mobilise all his distinguished contacts, both divine and mortal, our future footballing experience might one day resemble the following:
All of a team’s home games would be grouped together and all elements thereof similarly grouped. Hence, if it currently takes you one hour to travel to the match, in this new reality you endure a nineteen-hour trip prior to kick-off.
Upon arriving at the ground you buy nineteen programmes. You then queue for fifty-seven minutes to pass through the turnstile where you undergo a nine-and-a-half minute frisk by the steward.
You queue for ninety-five minutes at a counter, where you buy nineteen drinks. Upon reaching your seat thirty-eight minutes later, the hot drinks are cold and the cold drinks are warm.
During the players’ eight-hour warm-up, the teams are announced nineteen times in a row.
After nineteen coin tosses, the referee blows his whistle for ninety-five seconds.
Immediately the team score anywhere between forty and sixty goals, one after another. The stewards struggle to repel a pitch invasion.
You then sit and watch some fourteen hours of open play. Despite periods that see over a hundred successive fouls, seventy-five corners (one-by-one), a ten-player scuffle, and a broken leg, there are no more goals.
You spend thirteen-and-a-half hours wondering why you bother watching this rubbish, and thirty minutes realising why you do.
At half-time, which lasts for four-and-three-quarter hours, you stand for thirty-eight minutes in the queue for the toilet. Once there, you urinate for nine-and-a-half minutes continuously. For four of these minutes you repeat to your neighbour how poor the team are playing, spend three minutes complaining about the referee, and two minutes staring blankly at the wall.
Back in your seat, for ninety-five minutes you watch children in one-on-ones with a goalkeeper whilst working your way through nineteen Chicken Balti pies.
A further fourteen hours of open play includes a forty-minute period of continuous substitutions, three sending offs, and possibly even a change of manager.
It concludes with you witnessing your team concede between forty and sixty goals consecutively, your torment only halted by the final, elongated, whistle.
Over the next ninety-five minutes the crowd slowly files out of the ground, while John Paintsil undertakes nineteen laps of the pitch.
After the nineteen-hour return journey home, you settle down to watch twenty-six hours straight of Match Of The Day, but have to wait until the last hour-and-a-half to see the Fulham highlights.
In the first, he suggests that after death we might immediately begin to re-live the life that has just ended, but this time around all common activities would be grouped together and experienced in discrete blocks.
Hence, we would enjoy our entire life’s worth of showers in a single two-hundred-day-long drenching, and then bathe no more. Our lifetime allocation of pain would be endured in one excruciating stretch, and for three years we would do nothing but eat. We would sit at traffic lights, immobile, for six weeks, and for two days do nothing but tie shoelaces. And so on.
Apparently, a high-ranking official at the Premier League is an admirer of Mr. Eagleman’s book, and has become smitten with this notion in particular. In idle moments he is apt to daydream, and has begun to visualise the football season, which resides within his governance, being reorganised in such a way. However, upon receding from his fantastical reveries, and slipping reluctantly back to the intractable, Einstein-ordered world, he glumly acknowledges that such a transformation would require the ability to reconfigure human existence itself, something currently beyond his organisation’s remit.
However, emerging rumours imply that the official in question happened upon one Sepp Blatter in the washroom at an International Football soiree recently and, unable to stifle his vision any longer, confided in the FIFA president. Apparently Mr. Blatter, always enthused by innovation, promised to fully exploit his influence. So, should he manage to mobilise all his distinguished contacts, both divine and mortal, our future footballing experience might one day resemble the following:
All of a team’s home games would be grouped together and all elements thereof similarly grouped. Hence, if it currently takes you one hour to travel to the match, in this new reality you endure a nineteen-hour trip prior to kick-off.
Upon arriving at the ground you buy nineteen programmes. You then queue for fifty-seven minutes to pass through the turnstile where you undergo a nine-and-a-half minute frisk by the steward.
You queue for ninety-five minutes at a counter, where you buy nineteen drinks. Upon reaching your seat thirty-eight minutes later, the hot drinks are cold and the cold drinks are warm.
During the players’ eight-hour warm-up, the teams are announced nineteen times in a row.
After nineteen coin tosses, the referee blows his whistle for ninety-five seconds.
Immediately the team score anywhere between forty and sixty goals, one after another. The stewards struggle to repel a pitch invasion.
You then sit and watch some fourteen hours of open play. Despite periods that see over a hundred successive fouls, seventy-five corners (one-by-one), a ten-player scuffle, and a broken leg, there are no more goals.
You spend thirteen-and-a-half hours wondering why you bother watching this rubbish, and thirty minutes realising why you do.
At half-time, which lasts for four-and-three-quarter hours, you stand for thirty-eight minutes in the queue for the toilet. Once there, you urinate for nine-and-a-half minutes continuously. For four of these minutes you repeat to your neighbour how poor the team are playing, spend three minutes complaining about the referee, and two minutes staring blankly at the wall.
Back in your seat, for ninety-five minutes you watch children in one-on-ones with a goalkeeper whilst working your way through nineteen Chicken Balti pies.
A further fourteen hours of open play includes a forty-minute period of continuous substitutions, three sending offs, and possibly even a change of manager.
It concludes with you witnessing your team concede between forty and sixty goals consecutively, your torment only halted by the final, elongated, whistle.
Over the next ninety-five minutes the crowd slowly files out of the ground, while John Paintsil undertakes nineteen laps of the pitch.
After the nineteen-hour return journey home, you settle down to watch twenty-six hours straight of Match Of The Day, but have to wait until the last hour-and-a-half to see the Fulham highlights.
Thursday, 24 September 2009
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.”
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.”
Friday, 18 September 2009
CSKA Sofia 1 Fulham 1
With only 2 of the starters from Sunday’s Premiership victory over Everton lining up tonight, Hodgson’s approach to Fulham’s European “adventure” could be interpreted in one of two ways: it is a liability that, subverting form, has the potential to degrade the team’s Premier League status, and thus an early exit would not be mourned; or, it is an ideal opportunity to exercise squad and academy players, make them feel engaged, and allow their suitability for the first team to further assessed.
Slightly undermining the first, the commentator remarked, was the fact that all Fulham’s outfield players were internationals. As the game kicked off, he then proceeded to refer to “dear old Fulham”, rendering the remainder of his remarks as mere white noise.
Nevertheless, one hoped that the selected players could execute whatever strategy Hodgson had hatched for them, as, uncle Zuberbuhler aside, the bench boasted the same demographic as one from your local shopping centre - exclusively teenage - and one with not a first-team appearance seated upon it.
Along the flanks, the pairings of Painstil and Kelly, and Gera and Davies, instilled some experience. Chris Baird at centre-back would bear the responsibility of chaperoning both sidekick Chris Smalling and goalkeeper David Stockdale. Perhaps the greatest unknown was the central partnership of newcomers Riise and Greening.
Sofia began eagerly with 2 shots on goal in the first 3 minutes. Greening appeared to be adopting a Murphyesque role, dropping back to receive the ball from the defence. His distribution and insight, understandably, is yet to rival the team captain’s.
Although Sofia were working hard to limit space, Fulham slowly secured a grip on the game. Play was becoming increasingly contained within the centre of the pitch, and Sofia’s early forays forward were memories slowly dissolving.
While Riise was struggling to find a meaningful role, Baird was looking steady and assured, setting a fine example for his teenage accomplice.
As expected, fluidity and flair were once again hostages to organisation and containment. With fifteen minutes gone, Riise, Nevland, Kamara, and Davies may have enjoyed just one touch apiece.
As lack of involvement irked, Diomansy Kamara began to drop back to find the ball, before attempting to bedazzle the entire Sofia eleven. He had limited success, but his dynamism at least set an example for the team, and his admirable commitment was sustained through to the final minute of the game.
Fulham, robust, and surprisingly organised considering their unfamiliarity with each other, were slowly gaining ascendancy. The home side’s timidity was allowing them to begin to entertain grander plans.
The final minute of the half saw Fulham’s best chance when a Greening interception in midfield led to a web of tight interplay in the Sofia box, culminating in a Simon Davies shot directly at the goalkeeper.
Sofia began the second half with ambition magnified. As their pressure increased, so Fulham contrived to counter. Another intricate exchange between Kamara, Davies, and Nevland was eventually crowded out by the Sofia defence.
In the 61st minute, a pass was floated enticingly towards the edge of the Fulham box. The ball was cleverly chested on towards substitute Platini, perhaps revealing Smalling to be a little too forgiving in his marking. The striker reacted swiftly, held off the closing centre-back, and maintained his balance well to shoot wide of Stockdale and into the net.
It took Fulham three minutes to reply, and the swiftness of the response appeared to stun Sofia into a daze for the rest of the game.
With the home side committed upfield, a forward ball was hooked instinctively on by Nevland towards the advancing Kamara. With the Sofia defence stranded, their keeper elected to race him to the ball despite it contriving to drop some 25 yards out. Kamara prevailed, executing a deft touch to take the ball past the onrushing keeper. He pursued the ball to the edge of the box, and calmly slotted it into the opposite corner of the unguarded goal, doing well to evade the tackle of the fast-closing defender.
From then on, Fulham earned burgeoning possession, and cultivated increasing poise and creativity. Slowly they stifled Sofia, whose desire was dissipating.
With 15 mintues to go, the home team had a final, golden, opportunity. A pass skidded across the box from the left flank past a defence frozen in mid-appeal for a non-existent offside. A powerful rising strike from 8 yards out demanded an accomplished reaction save from Stockdale.
With a few minutes remaining, Kamara was booked for his over-exuberant closing down. Application that, coupled with his attacking initiative, merited a a share of the man of the match plaudits with the calm and commanding Chris Baird.
Ultimately, however one interprets the manager’s approach, this was a satisfying, and satisfactory, result; one that was, considering the personnel and their lack of common playing time, founded on a performance of surprising cohesion and understanding.
Slightly undermining the first, the commentator remarked, was the fact that all Fulham’s outfield players were internationals. As the game kicked off, he then proceeded to refer to “dear old Fulham”, rendering the remainder of his remarks as mere white noise.
Nevertheless, one hoped that the selected players could execute whatever strategy Hodgson had hatched for them, as, uncle Zuberbuhler aside, the bench boasted the same demographic as one from your local shopping centre - exclusively teenage - and one with not a first-team appearance seated upon it.
Along the flanks, the pairings of Painstil and Kelly, and Gera and Davies, instilled some experience. Chris Baird at centre-back would bear the responsibility of chaperoning both sidekick Chris Smalling and goalkeeper David Stockdale. Perhaps the greatest unknown was the central partnership of newcomers Riise and Greening.
Sofia began eagerly with 2 shots on goal in the first 3 minutes. Greening appeared to be adopting a Murphyesque role, dropping back to receive the ball from the defence. His distribution and insight, understandably, is yet to rival the team captain’s.
Although Sofia were working hard to limit space, Fulham slowly secured a grip on the game. Play was becoming increasingly contained within the centre of the pitch, and Sofia’s early forays forward were memories slowly dissolving.
While Riise was struggling to find a meaningful role, Baird was looking steady and assured, setting a fine example for his teenage accomplice.
As expected, fluidity and flair were once again hostages to organisation and containment. With fifteen minutes gone, Riise, Nevland, Kamara, and Davies may have enjoyed just one touch apiece.
As lack of involvement irked, Diomansy Kamara began to drop back to find the ball, before attempting to bedazzle the entire Sofia eleven. He had limited success, but his dynamism at least set an example for the team, and his admirable commitment was sustained through to the final minute of the game.
Fulham, robust, and surprisingly organised considering their unfamiliarity with each other, were slowly gaining ascendancy. The home side’s timidity was allowing them to begin to entertain grander plans.
The final minute of the half saw Fulham’s best chance when a Greening interception in midfield led to a web of tight interplay in the Sofia box, culminating in a Simon Davies shot directly at the goalkeeper.
Sofia began the second half with ambition magnified. As their pressure increased, so Fulham contrived to counter. Another intricate exchange between Kamara, Davies, and Nevland was eventually crowded out by the Sofia defence.
In the 61st minute, a pass was floated enticingly towards the edge of the Fulham box. The ball was cleverly chested on towards substitute Platini, perhaps revealing Smalling to be a little too forgiving in his marking. The striker reacted swiftly, held off the closing centre-back, and maintained his balance well to shoot wide of Stockdale and into the net.
It took Fulham three minutes to reply, and the swiftness of the response appeared to stun Sofia into a daze for the rest of the game.
With the home side committed upfield, a forward ball was hooked instinctively on by Nevland towards the advancing Kamara. With the Sofia defence stranded, their keeper elected to race him to the ball despite it contriving to drop some 25 yards out. Kamara prevailed, executing a deft touch to take the ball past the onrushing keeper. He pursued the ball to the edge of the box, and calmly slotted it into the opposite corner of the unguarded goal, doing well to evade the tackle of the fast-closing defender.
From then on, Fulham earned burgeoning possession, and cultivated increasing poise and creativity. Slowly they stifled Sofia, whose desire was dissipating.
With 15 mintues to go, the home team had a final, golden, opportunity. A pass skidded across the box from the left flank past a defence frozen in mid-appeal for a non-existent offside. A powerful rising strike from 8 yards out demanded an accomplished reaction save from Stockdale.
With a few minutes remaining, Kamara was booked for his over-exuberant closing down. Application that, coupled with his attacking initiative, merited a a share of the man of the match plaudits with the calm and commanding Chris Baird.
Ultimately, however one interprets the manager’s approach, this was a satisfying, and satisfactory, result; one that was, considering the personnel and their lack of common playing time, founded on a performance of surprising cohesion and understanding.
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