Bring Mitro back and bring Jokanovic with him Goal scoring and next manager problems solved in one fell swoop. 2 birds with....ahem....2 stones I guess
I don't mind the training being partly used. However this is not the club stating this, its the Chroony. It would a contradiction as Rafa said Mitrovic had trained well both last season and this season in the paper. Which paper? The Chronny Its either the club feeding the Chronny info to try to dampen down the Mitro support, or the Chronny just spewing utter crap again. I doubt very much Rafa is feeling he got this so badly wrong he has needed to feed this kind of information to the paper. It would be very petty. This looks like Lee Ryder doing what Lee Ryder does. Spunks all over Rafa's back, and puts information out there as if its gospel. How stupid they must think the fans are that we'll just forget what they printed previously.
The thing is with Benitez- He is notorious for alienating players who don't kiss his arse. There is slso that well documented spat he had with Ronaldo when Benitez, in training, tried to tell Cristiano that he wasn't kicking the ball properly. The man makes catastrophic mistakes which are completely ignored. As above - I like the bloke. But this demi-god status he has is just silly. He has ****ed up with Mitrovic and I don't mean ina little way. His faith in the Spanish fairies [ Joselu and Perez] as well as Dwight Gayle could ultimately cost us. He has treated Mitro disgracefully and it looks like the latter is having the last laugh.
So while we are all keen on looking at that greener grass over there did we also **** up badly with Chucky Ferreyra? Twenty three goals in 30 games this season for Shaktar Donetsk including 3 in 7 in Champions League. His statistics show that it took him most of the 2015-16 season to be de-Pardewed but after that he has been pretty prolific:
How ironic would it be if Fulham go up with Mitro the hero and we go down with Joselu the flop! ****ing epic fail! Gayle 5 goals all season Joselu 4 goals all season Mitrovic for Fulham since jan 31 2018 5 goals in 7 games......
As a Fulham supporter I have followed your opinions of Mitrovic with Interest. In the short time that he has been with us he has shown what we,as a team, have been lacking .and that is a player who has the strength and ability to hold onto the ball. Now that he is approaching full fitness -was he really at full fitness at Newcastle? - we believe that he will only get better. SJ has suggested that he would like to sign the lad on a permanent basis - but herein lies the problem. There are clubs,both here and abroad,that have deeper pockets than us, and the more he impresses the higher his stock will become. If he has to return to Newcastle I would hope that Rafa would note his efforts at Fulham and try to accommodate him. The lad is a team player and for those of you who saw his first goal for us against Sheffield,well it did not tell the whole story I have posted a link at the end of this post. Have a look and see what you think.
Rafa, even if Mitro bangs in the ridiculous 20-25 goals target, will look to get rid because quite frankly Mitro isn't Spanish. TBH I'd much rather let Rafa walk at the end of the season - hes a bang average manager who has had success at clubs at the top of the table with money to spend. His football is drab, and when I say drab i mean so ****ing awful I'd rather be back in the Championship than have to watch another season of us try and defend a 0-0 draw. Jakanovic can utilise Mitro next year as I'd love to bring him to SJP, plays football the right way, always willing to have a go, Fulham by far and away played the best football last season although not seen to much this season that video show's me they still are.
Having watched the video one thing does stand out for me which is the tempo/speed of pass in that build up. It's not laborious and slow the Fulham players keep the ball moving and don't linger on it like we tend to do.
Great watch that. I love the way your lot play under Jokanovic. Obviously a very talented coach. As Groot says its the pace at which the ball is moved, also with changes of direction. That is what is a killer when defending. That is football I'd happily watch any day of the week. I'll be honest, we don't do that. The argument against would be we don't have the players of course, and if we tried that at this level it would be suicidal. Its why many see Benitez as a good fit for now. He will never play that way regardless of what players he has at his disposal. His style throughout his career has been creating a tactical minefield with rigid discipline where you wait for the opposition to make a mistake. He won't buy the players to play that way so its a mute point. Its not great to watch being honest. To be fair I'm not a big believer in not being able to play the way you do at a higher level either. Obviously the better the player the more successful you will be. But there is room for all different kinds of approaches and all of them can have success regardless of the level. Good luck for the season. In a lot of ways I want you to come up. However if we do stay up I'd rather have a team who are less likely to be successful! Just being selfish.
We seem to overlook how **** the team is whenever Mitrovic, Gayle or Joselu play. Atsu, Ritchie, Shelvey, Merino, Kenedy, Perez and Murphy are the players picked to create chances in open play but they can’t be in double figures across the lot of em. Yedders probably has more. What struck me is that Fulham play to win, at a high tempo and the creators are creating. We do none of the above so realistically it doesn’t matter if it’s Mitro, Gayle or fecking Higuain, the result would be exactly the same. Team is massively, depressingly underinvested and plays to not lose so as to survive in the PL. If Fulham do come up, let’s see if they can be as adventurous in the PL, create as much or if they spend as little as our ****y management team does. From the looks of it, Fulham will part with more money for Mitro than we’ve EVER spent on a player. Sad fact. No striker is going to look good in this system. Our issue is Mitro isn’t the type to follow orders so for what Rafa feels we need, isn’t right.
Cheers for the info mate. Herein lies the explanation of difference in play though, you'll be lucky if Newcastle score a goal that has 5 passes in the build up this season. As is the same for most teams below 10th. The comments I've read off Rafa is he expected Mitro to do well at Fulham, but he said a team averaging 40% or less possession cannot play to his strengths. From my own experience of Mitro, he's likely to go missing or get overly frustrated when not receiving much of the ball. None of that makes him a **** player mind, just not useful for a team that soaks pressure for the majority of the game. Sadly we don't have the players to play anything else. We were a shoo-in, by a lot of this board, for relegation at the start of the season just by the team on paper. My honest hope is Mitro fires in a **** tonne for yourselves, keeps himself in check, and warrants us changing to accommodate to his style. The reality will be in whether we're given funding to change from relegation certainties to mid-table hopefuls.
I think what stuck me this season as a newly promoted team, is its not the way teams like Swansea, Bournemouth went about their business and stayed up in their first season. They would go press and harried opponents out of possesion, attack with real pace and precision and yes they were well organised defensively and defended as a unit but we seem content to sit in, hope to break at little more than snail pace with players like Joselu, Ritchie, Perez and Dwight "my hamstring could go at any second" Gayle, and try and sneak draws out of winning positions.
It's easy to confuse 'demi-god' status with relief that we have a capable manager. I can talk about better managers and all that crap, talk about how if i was manager I'd just make us an attacking team out of nowhere and stick Mitro in the middle so he can score 30 a season. Or I can just accept that, with the team this season and the fact most managers wouldn't risk coming here, Benitez is the best we can get in our current situation. If next season he gets backed, and we still play every game on the back foot with little to show for it, then yeah I'll start moaning. For now though, holding up players scoring in Championship and League One as proof of glaring errors doesn't hold that much water. To me if Arma returns and Mitro does, they're not given a chance and we have Joselu up-front still then, yeh, I'll be ****ing fuming. But right now, we said we'd be battling relegation and we are, not sure what reason I have to bash Rafa for that. Nobody was expecting attacking, or even good, football at the start of the season I'm not sure when the level of expectation changed. He told Ronaldo how he felt he should do free-kicks by the way. Any player at the top of his game would surely want to be challenged to improve or be given other options right? Otherwise what's the point. He also didn't alienate Ronaldo, he played all season
I think we've created plenty chances this season that have fallen to Jos/Gayle/Perez which, had they fallen to Mitro most of which would have ended up in the back of the net. I'd put good money (a fiver maybe) on us having dropped a good 6-8 points this season due to that shower of ****e missing ****ing sitters ! I'm thrilled that Mitro is doing the business, it just goes to show you what happens when you have confidence in your manager and you feel wanted in the team and not just benched and thrown on in the 89th minute when 2-0 down. I personally think Rafa has dropped a bollock but it's not all lost. He may well still have a future with us. He's certainly better than Jos, and I'd rather sell Gayle and keep Mitro. He linked up quite well with Perez but I still think Perez is too much of a snowflake.
I think the mistake a lot of people make is they think Rafa plays the way he does because of constraints. It simply isn't the case. If Benitez isn't interested in playing attacking football with Real Madrid and all their riches, he certainly isn't going to do it with Newcastle. You can go higher with better players playing with Benitez type tactics. You can also do so with playing attacking football. You can achieve the same outcome with either playing Jokanovic attacking or Benitez counter attacking predatory tactics, at either end of the table, with good or bad players. The fallacy often pumped out there by fans and managers as an excuse is they have to play certain way because of the players they have. Its simply not the case. One it comes down to who the manager buys, the type of player he goes for. Benitez goes for players he thinks have the intelligence to carry out his tactics. Probably sometimes at the expense of technical quality. That makes sense because his style is not based on those requirements. Secondly and even more importantly, it comes down to coaching. Many of Bournemouth's players played lower level football, probably wouldn't have been fashionable names, but Howe coached them in such a way they represented his style. The demands Benitez puts on his players is huge in terms tactical nous. He reminds me of Allardyce in some ways as he is obsessed with tactics, stopping the opposition. Clearly he is better than Allardyce of course. There is nothing wrong with it as he has had great success in his career. You can go too far the other way too. Jokanovic by all accounts wants to let his players play, and affords more freedom for them to make decisions rather than following a script. Mitrovic is guy who needs to be allowed to play. He doesn't want to get bogged down in the nuances of Benitez tactical requirements. That's why regardless of how he does at Fulham, he has no future here unless the manager changes.
Football will never be massively attacking under Benitez but can still be entertaining. It's tough comparisons when Fulham's man hasn't done a prem season yet. I still struggle to think of good football from a team surviving relegation successfully. Wigan, who only showed up for the 8 game run-ins? Maybe us/Brighton under Hughton? Relegation specialists read: Pulis, Allardyce, O'neill, Hodgson, Bruce, Hughes? All defensive really You can play attacking football and stay up but history says it's a bigger risk. The ****ter your team, the bigger the risk to me
