Is this the year we finally win a major trophy?
Dan Cooke looks at how this squad might be perfectly set-up for cup success
I think we might be a cup team.
Admittedly, that sounds like an incredibly optimistic sentence given we barely looked like a League One team on Tuesday night. However, I’ve managed to talk myself out of my irritation at that performance, thanks to some similarly tepid football from our Premier League peers and another very favourable draw.
Having had that time to think, I’m finding it hard not to get excited about our cup chances. Suddenly, we’re a game against League One Wycombe away from being in the quarter finals, and this squad has a lot going for it.
Squad depth
It’s astonishing that the team that started against Cambridge United was a completely rotated one. I implore you to have a look at the Fulham side that lost against Crawley just three years ago and it will really hammer home just how far we’ve come.
In our third round tie, there wasn’t a single player on the pitch who I’d be concerned about featuring in a league game this season (other than maybe Lecomte and that’s not really a slight on him). That’s massive and key to cup success. It gives us a lovely balance of allowing important players to get some rest, before bringing them out in the latter stages of the competition, all without significantly weakening either our league or cup line-ups.
If we do go deep in either cup competition, it will likely have to start taking priority over the league. What a privilege it is to be able to call on Cairney, Castagne, Diop, Cuenca, Raul, to step into top flight games as rotational options. I can’t remember the last time there was such a small drop-off between core and fringe squad members, in a positive way (I can remember plenty of occasions where there was no drop-off throughout the squad, but that was because they were all useless).
This is even more significant when you consider that the scary teams in domestic competitions are also fighting in Europe and can’t afford to take their eye off the league. Most other teams will consider rotating right up until the final stages, we shouldn’t have to.
New-found defensive stability
The hallmark of this season so far has been how solid we have looked at the back. Statistically we’re putting out some really good defensive numbers and we’ve hopefully seen the back of our unfortunate run of giving away penalties.
Joachim Andersen has started to look every bit the leader we thought he would be. His partnership with Calvin Bassey is really flourishing and as a pair they seem to have a lovely balance. We’re blessed in the full-back department, especially when you consider we’ve looked so solid without the best left-back in the division.
We’ve all heard variations on the cliche about attack winning you games but defences winning titles; but it’s true. Knockout games are so frequently tight, scrappy games of football, by building these solid foundations, we’re starting to morph into a really dangerous cup side.
I wrote a piece about how Silva has evolved his tactics from being entertainers to being something sterner. That additional steel, that defensive resoluteness, is something we could have done with in our semi-final against Liverpool and definitely needed in our FA cup quarter-final gubbing by Palace.
Being able to win gritty games 1-0 feels like the sort of thing we need to be able to do to finally break our lifelong celibacy from silverware. This side feels like it’s capable of that.
Moments
We spoke a lot about last season being defined by moments. I actually think this squad is blessed with “moments” players. Harry Wilson and Rodrigo Muniz are great examples and I think Kevin and Samuel Chukwueze will turn out to be too.
They are all players who are capable of doing something special out of nowhere. Eberechi Eze is the reason we didn’t make it Wembley this year, he’s also the reason why Palace now possess their first ever trophy. We can never be blessed with a squad like Manchester City’s, but neither will Crystal Palace. What they had was the right blend of defensive stability, attacking flair and a slice of luck. We’ve got the first two, and if our top scorer is anything to go by, I’d stick a tenner on Own Goal scoring the winner in the final.
In order to win a cup, we’ll have to do it against underdogs, we will have to succeed against teams who we would ordinarily expect to lose to. I think that suits us. We’ve now proved that we are capable of beating anyone (apart from Manchester City). Every other high profile team has been on the end of a Marco Silva masterclass over the past two seasons. We’ve done it before, we can do it again.
Are Fulham definitely going to win a trophy this season? No, of course not. However, do I think this is probably the best chance we’ve had in a long time? Absolutely.
We can see the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup, at which point, under the lights at Craven Cottage, you’d back us against anyone. If we don’t succeed there, then focus can shift to the FA Cup, where last season we were one step from Wembley.
It feels like we’re building up to something. We’ve experienced gut-wrenching disappointment in the cups for three consecutive years, which all provided pertinent lessons on what it takes. I think Marco is desperate for this, he knows what it means to us and he wants his name in Fulham folklore.
It really feels like this year, we could go all the way.