The least consistent Premier League club off the pitch this season has, accordingly, enjoyed less consistency on it than any other side. Martin Jol never stood much chance, beginning the season as one of the favourites to be first to lose his job, and he was undermined heavily when the club brought in René Meulensteen as his number two. Jol's ill-fated campaign was ended in early December when the worst-kept secret in football was revealed and Meulensteen was awarded the top job. Now, with Meulensteen's stint having too failed - at least sufficiently so for him to be removed - Felix Magath is at the helm. The only Premier League team to have had 3 permanent managers this season are rooted to the bottom of the table.
Both of their managerial changes have been met with widespread bemusement this season, and rightly so. Jol left the club 18th in the table and on a run of 6 successive losses, but they were only 13 games into the season and had plenty of time to turn things around. Meulensteen was seen as something of a coup for a club of Fulham's stature, but with an identical record to Jol 13 games later - 3 wins, a draw and 9 losses - he too was dismissed, just two weeks after a January transfer window in which he had been given hefty funding to sign new players.
The strangest thing about Meulensteen's sacking was that his investments were starting to show signs of return. The Cottagers had just drawn at Old Trafford having led for nearly an hour and also came within an injury-time, penalty-inducing Sascha Riether foul of taking a point off in-form Liverpool. And those came without the help of record signing Kostas Mitroglou.
Mitroglou arrived in the winter, inexplicably giving up the chance to continue Olympiakos' Champions League campaign against Untied in favour of a relegation battle with Fulham. Injury stopped him playing at Old Trafford for his new club, who take a 2-goal lead into the second leg and may knock United out without him. Fulham, meanwhile, look set for the drop.
Felix Magath is now in charge for the run-in, but there does seem to be an eminently fatalistic feel to Fulham's campaign. Magath has taken one point from three matches in charge. One point from clashes that included two against fellow scrappers West Brom and Cardiff. After the defeat at the Cardiff City Stadium at the weekend Magath claimed their opponents had been victorious as they had greater familiarity with relegation battles. The Bluebirds have not finished within 10 places of bottom for nine seasons. It's hard to give them much hope at all.
If Magath has such a limited knowledge of Fulham's opposition, what are the chances he knows Fulham's players well enough to get the best of them. In his 3 matches so far, the team have scored 3 goals, but each could arguably be attributed more to poor goalkeeping on the parts of Ben Foster and Petr Cech and poor Cardiff defending from a Fulham corner than inventive or incisive attacking. What is more, neither Chelsea nor Cardiff had to play particularly well to net 3 times. Cardiff did so twice from corners and got another fortuitously via a ricochet off Riether, while André Schürrle doubled his tally for the Blues with some ease.
Maarten Stekelenburg looks devoid of confidence and may even have relinquished a place in the Oranje World Cup squad for the summer after a string of shaky performances. He has made errors that have led to goals in 2 of Magath's 3 games, and Fernando Torres should have punished another mistake in the other game. Johnny Heitinga has been brought in to shore things up at the back but is he the player to bring calm and serenity to the Premier League's leakiest defence? Almost certainly not.
He has a goal and an assist in 5 matches since signing, but still only has an average WhoScored rating of 6.63. He makes 7.4 clearances per game, but only 0.6 tackles and 1.6 interceptions and his distribution is poor, with a pass success rate of just 79.3%. That may have been in part thanks to the contribution of Magath, under whom the club have a pass accuracy of 72.2%, down from 79.1% under Meulensteen and 81.3% under Jol. Granted it is a small sample size and poor pass success rate in itself isn't necessarily a negative - just ask Tony Pulis - but coupled with Magath's recent results, it indicates that things have far from improved.
In midfield, they have plenty of central options, with the Sidwell, Parker, Karagounis, Kvist and Holtby all adequate Premier League players, but it is out wide that problems persist. Players starting in wide midfield positions for Fulham this season have provided just 4 goals and 6 assists in 48 appearances. Crosses per game have increased under Magath - from 13.6 per game to 15.3 - which may indicate that he has earmarked an issue and looked to resolve it, but with only 1 goal from open play in 3 matches, they have not been solved sufficiently.
Fulham have 9 matches to play and their inconsistencies with each of their managers this season give little reason to believe they can work their way out of their current predicament. Having endured the longest winless streak of any team this season (9 matches), the longest they have gone undefeated all season is 2 games; the joint-worst such record in the Premier League and, what is more, they only managed that once - under Jol. Their last 3 fixtures of the season are more than winnable and could be a chance to break that record, bur given that they travel to Manchester City and Tottenham whilst also hosting Everton before that, they could already be down by that point.
Magath brings with him to Craven Cottage a wealth of experience and there is certainly potential for him to come good, but how he hopes to go about saving this Fulham side still remains to be seen. We need to be shown how they plan on going about gaining vital points in the run-in before it's too late.
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