Fulham boss Marco Silva on ‘bad performance’ as Crawley cause major upset in EFL Cup

Marco Silva praised Crawley Town’s work rate in their 2-0 win against Fulham in the EFL Cup on Tuesday evening.

The Whites are out of the competition at the second round stage – goals from James Balagizi and Tom Nichols condemning them to defeat.

Fulham suffered their first defeat of the season after making an unbeaten start with two draws and a win in their first three Premier League matches after being promoted from the Championship last campaign.

Silva said: “It was a bad performance, definitely, and of course the result as well. It puts us out of a competition that we wanted to win.

“Congratulations to them, from the first minute they wanted it more than us, and after that we lost a little bit of control in the game, started to make some mistakes, and they scored, which made it more difficult for us.

“I tried at half-time to change some things, and we started the second half in the worst way possible.

“We tried to do something different, and we made the same mistakes. But that’s football.

“These types of games, we have to show the same enthusiasm, the same intensity that we saw from our opponent.

“We know that when they play against a Premier League club it’s an opportunity for them to show that they can match us. It’s a normal situation.

“I’m not talking about the attitude of my players. It’s just reading the game, to know what’s happened, taking the best decisions, is something that we didn’t do, which created these problems for us.

“Unfortunately we are out of the competition, now we have to analyse it with the players, and look to the next one.”