We’ve long considered Fulham and Marco Silva to be in the perfect marriage. After 10th, 13th and 11th placed Premier League finishes and what looks certain to be another mid-table end to this season we can no longer imagine one without the other thanks to those most Fulham of outcomes and what might be a growing sense of apathy towards them if anyone cared enough to not care about them.
Silva deserves some credit for the indifference. We might care slightly more if they were in a relegation battle for example. Though the 11th highest annual wage bill (£70m) in the Premier League suggests he’s neither under or overachieving. Again, very Fulham.
One source of pride for Silva has been the what he insists has been their “very serious” approach to cup competitions since he joined the club.
Having failed to reach the quarter-finals of either domestic cup competition since the 2009/10 season – a frankly embarrassing record for a football club that had been in the Premier League in six of the 12 campaigns in that time – Fulham have made two FA Cup quarter-finals and one EFL Cup semi-final under the Portuguese boss.
“Definitely one of the things that the last three, four seasons, we have been changing completely is the mindset for this competition,” Silva said ahead of the game. “We have been very serious. And this group of players, they have been very serious.”
A commendable and absolutely correct stance for the manager of a club that’s not going to get relegated and has only an outside chance of qualifying for Europe to take. While almost all other Premier League clubs have bigger fish to fry, Fulham barely need chips with their haddock such is the ideal size of the FA Cup portion.
But Silva’s actions didn’t just speak louder than his words, they bellowed his disregard for the competition and exposed his “very serious” claim as hot air aimed to placate what will have been thousands of confused and quite possible irate Fulham fans before kick-off.
“It doesn’t matter if you make changes or not,” he said. “Of course, when you make a big number of changes, you have always a risk there, because the quality is there, but the routines are not the same, even if everybody knows what they have to do.”
OK, so it does matter if you make changes then. As evidenced by Silva “going mad on the bench” for most of the first half at the wholly unsurprising lack of synergy in a team following nine(?!) changes from the 1-0 defeat to West Ham and the astounding ease with which Southampton continually caught them on the break.
Leo Scienza really should have given Southampton the lead when he raced through one on one with Benjamin Lecomte before sliding his shot wide of the post, and there were several other occasions – including one in which Southampton were four on two – when a better final ball would have made them pay as an impotent midfield trio of Harrison Reid, Tom Cairney and Emile Smith Rowe were rarely in picture as the Saints raced through.
Fulham improved after half-time but neither Oscar Bobb nor Rodrigo Muniz took their chance to stake their claims for regular spots in the team, and Silva making just one substitute before the 89th minute while watching what was some pretty inert football from his side was almost as damning as the sweeping changes he made to his starting XI.
Josh King was introduced less than a minute before Joachim Anderson fouled Finn Azaz in the box and Ross Stewart scored the winner from the spot. Raul Jimenez was given stoppage time to score a goal to keep Fulham in the FA Cup.
He failed and the blame can be laid solely at Silva’s door as Fulham fans trudging home are plunged into an existential crisis from their base-level consideration as to what the point of all this is.
Instead of a quarter-final they have nine Premier League dead rubbers to look forward to, and while Silva is never going to be sacked as Fulham’s supposed perfect partner, his decisions on Sunday will see a dramatic uptick in the number of fans not caring whether he signs a contract extension beyond this season or not, to match the indifference he showed towards the FA Cup and the way the masses feel about a football club that’s become a pointless pastiche of itself under his leadership.
