Just my opinion, but there has been a lot of unfair abuse aimed at Felix and Khan of late, when the rot had already set in long before they arrived! In fact I reckon it started when Roy left us. Hughes took over from Roy with Roys squad and tried to change the style of play. There have been various nostalgic points of view about Mark Hughess tenure, but the fact is we are playing very poor football for the first few months, culminating in the West Ham debacle on New Years Day. Apparently, from this point the players started to rebel against him and went back to Hodgsons style of play. This was when things started to improve. When he left it was possibly this, along with lack of funds to replace the rebels in his comments as much as the bigger funding picture. I was as happy as anyone that Jol signed, but unfortunately Jol was more of a manager than a coach. When he managed bigger clubs like Spurs he would usually leave the coaching to others and would concentrate on more administrative duties. Fulham, however required a coach foremost. The consequent decline in training along with an ageing squad and underinvestment (for all the good that MAF did, he must take the blame for this) clearly showed in our performances and led to our relegation. I still believe that Jol is a good manager, but not for a team like Fulham. This, in my opinion is why we went down and it has little to do with Felix, Rene or Khan, who all came too late to save what was a sinking ship! ...and so we come to life in the Championship. Most of the Premiership first team were either no longer good enough, unwilling to go down a division or unwilling to take the resultant pay cuts, etc. This is not Felixs fault! Furthermore they were a product of the lack of training provided by the previous administration. Consequently, more vocal former players have questioned the training regimes. I am not interested in the views of JAR et al on this subject, when they were so obviously not fit enough before he arrived and were just probably unused to proper fitness training! So Felix was left with a decimated squad and a mandate to produce a younger, fitter team. The fans were all screaming for the club to use the youth players and this was the ideal opportunity to start afresh. However, you cannot reasonably expect a team where most of the players hadnt played a competitive match before the Ipswich game. It was always going to take some time before Felix worked out his best team/formations and also before those players would actually perform as a team rather than individuals. We are playing well enough to compete, with very little experience and have only been let down really by a lack of goals. Hopefully the two former Leeds United players will be able to resolve this as an established partnership and we will shortly start to get the results we deserve. However, this is not and was never going to be a quick fix! Everyone screaming for Felixs head after 4 or 5 games need to be realistic. There are obvious signs of improvement and the results will come. There were a lot of things wrong with our club by the end of last season and Felix has pretty much had to start again. We now have a chance to build a team which can be top class in a few years. Felix and Khan have sown the seeds on a potentially bright future. Lets just have a little patience and give them the opportunity to develop and grow the team and the club.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 19:23:43 +0000
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