Scott Parker: Fulham deserved nothing against Leeds United
BY KAI BENNETT
Scott Parker didn’t hide his disappointment at Fulham’s performance in last night’s 2-1 loss to Leeds.
Joachim Andersen had levelled the contest after Patrick Bamford opened the scoring for the visitors, but Raphinha’s second-half strike was enough to take all three points for the visitors.
“I’m disappointed,” said the Fulham manager. “We didn’t deserve anything from the game and the best team won. We huffed and puffed and probably were a little bit fortunate to go in at 1-1.
“The second half then comes along and we miss a massive chance just before they go and score, we struggled at times tonight and that was disappointing.
“The way Leeds play they make the game end to end, they want the game to be like a basketball match, we spoke about having cool heads in those moments and getting some control but we struggled with that at times.
“I’ve stood here many times this season after a draw, after a loss and said: ‘You know what? We played really well.’ But that wasn’t the case tonight.
“You’re always in the game with Leeds, they score goals and put you under pressure like we saw tonight, but you always have a chance because of the way they play, in terms of our desire and work ethic it was there but we fell short at certain moments.”
Parker felt set-plays were the way to hurt Leeds and that was the thinking behind bringing Aleksandar Mitrovic on.
“First half we caused them problems, our goal came from that, but in terms of the first half I didn’t feel we had a real control, the way I wanted us to, so at that moment you have to go a little bit longer and felt Mitrovic was that guy that could give us a platform up top and get runners off him.”
Parker believes their remaining fixtures at Craven Cottage are critical.
“It’s the key, of course it is, there’s eight games left but also the away form. We’ve got eight games now, eight finals and we’ve got ourselves in a great position. I’m very disappointed with tonight but this is a little blip, we’ve had many blips at the start of the season, midway through the season and we’ve just hit a blip tonight.
“We’ll regroup, we’ll come back fighting – like we have done for the majority of this year.
“If you have your off days in the Premier League, or a dip in performance, you get punished. The best team won tonight and sometimes as frustrating as it is that’s the cold hard fact of tonight’s game. We need to work out where it went wrong and go again from there.”
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