This is my first post in this thread, and it's a good thing too, because in retrospect I would have made an ass of myself with some spectacularly wrong predictions. But even if I haven't been updating on Fulham as the season progressed, I'd like to post an end-of-season reflection.
To lay the groundwork, the Cottagers were back in the Championship after a decade and a half in the top flight. Now, I should give manager Felix Magath credit; he's a contender for the worst manager/coach I've seen in my years as a sports fan. He was bad in a Bobby V. way, where it would be tremendously entertaining provided you hate the team he's leading. He pulled off the most Bobby V.-esque move in the history of sports: last season, when Brede Hangeland was diagnosed with thigh soreness,
he overruled the team doctor's treatment regimen and instead had the captain put a block of cheese over the injured area. (Needless to say, neither Hangeland nor the team doctor stuck around long after that incident.) Like Bobby V., he's the kind of manager that shakes your allegiance and makes you question everything.
Under Magath's "leadership," they managed just one point out of their first seven matches, and frankly that may have been more than they deserved. Despite big talk about a quick return to the Premiership, their lackluster made a trip down to League 1 seem more appropriate. Mercifully, he was relieved of duty early in the season and replaced by academy coach Kit Symons. In the first game under their caretaker manager, they showed the first signs of life all season, and they managed their first win in the next game. Fulham quickly became one of the best teams in the division, losing only three of their next 14 matches and forcing the team to promote Symons to permanent manager. All of a sudden, the question became whether their awful start had buried them too deep or whether they'd be able to sneak into the playoff.
But it was too good to be true. They'd soon have a stretch of 11 games with just one win (in a game that they played very poorly) and three draws that dropped them into a second straight relegation battle. The offense was struggling to put the ball in the net (they scored more than one goal only once in those 11 games), but the real problem was the porous defense. Young goalie Marcus Betinelli accorded himself pretty well in his debut season on the first team, but he faced an onslaught. Week after week, the defense conceded double digit shots, in large number from the most dangerous parts of the pitch. The defense's inability to stop opposing offenses in turn afforded the offense few opportunities to attack in transition.
It was pretty demoralizing – they'd have a game or two where they looked ok but still lost or drew a game they should have won. Moral victories are great in the first half of the season, maybe, but at some point if you want to stay up (er, not fall farther down), you need points. But as March wound down, they finally started getting some, with only one loss in their last 7 games. Heading into the final match day of the season, they're creeping into the middle of the table. The stretch was highlighted by a
dramatic 4-3 win against Middlesborough in their final home game to end the season on an exclamation point. (I realize the season isn't over, but at this point they could lose 0-8 to Norwich and it would still feel like ending the season on a high note.)
So whither Fulham as the first season back in the Championship ends?
At this point, conventional wisdom has Symon being sacked. Hopefully they will be able to get a new manager quickly (something they've sometimes struggled with over the past couple of seasons). In one encouraging sign, Tony Khan, the son of owner Shahid Khan, has
admitted on twitter that the team hasn't had a great approach:
And to your point, I believe that the club has made many moves that weren't supported by statistical research. That will change
It's not clear what that will actually translate to, but I expect the Khans will invest some money in the team, starting with revamping the defense over the summer.
One side note: this is only my 9th season as a Fulham supporter, and my first encounter with relegation. I wasn't sure what to expect. Now don't get me wrong; I wish they hadn’t been relegated and were still in the top flight. I'd love nothing more than for them to recapture the magic of the Europa league run. It was frustrating to see all their best players leave over last summer. But having said that, I didn't really notice much difference. Listening to the radio stream or watching the on-line replay, the games were no less dramatic, and I was no less invested in the result. This may seem obvious to those of you who are veterans of European soccer fandom, but it was a relief to me.
(Ironically, I was able to watch more games this year than I was last year despite relegation. It's amazing how much better a broadcast experience the team can produce when it's doing it simply for the good of the fans, rather than Comcast's compulsion to drive every investment they make into the ground. But remarkable incompetence is Comcast's specialty, so it wasn't a surprise that they could screw up the Premier League.)