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Fulham boss
Roy Hodgson |
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The Fulham manager, Roy
Hodgson, has expressed his disappointment at having to play an
FA Cup replay against Swansea tomorrow night,
two days after a tough match against West Bromwich Albion. Fulham beat West Bromwich 2–0 to go eighth in the
Premier League .
Hodgson said: "I don't want to make any more fuss of it than I'm making by
saying one day's preparation is not enough. All I'm doing is stating an obvious
fact: there's nobody in football that thinks it's a good idea to play Premier
League matches on a Sunday and then two days later the fifth round of the FA
Cup. But we've got to do it so we'll get on with it.
"We have a high-energy game. We ask a lot of our players. So with only one day's
rest it's going to be very hard for those players to come and give that level of
performance again."
Hodgson said efforts had been made by Fulham to have the Swansea game moved, but
to no avail. "[Club secretary] Darren Preston and [chief executive] Alistair
Mackintosh worked their socks off and tried every avenue to get the game changed
so that we could have a better preparation time," he said, "but unfortunately
they were unable to succeed."
Asked what shape his players were in after the Albion match, Hodgson said:
""We'll see tomorrow, it's as simple as that. I'm not anxious to make big
changes, it's not something I'm anxious to do but it might be forced upon me
because I want to put out a team that can run around for 90 minutes and work
hard. But I also want to put a team out on Saturday against Arsenal that can run
around and work hard.
"What I don't want to do is lose players for a longer period of time because I'm
forcing them to do things they can't do. So the assessment we make of players is
going to be very, very important and Mark Taylor and his sports science people
have a very big role to play."
The winners of the Cup replay will host Manchester United, the Premier League
leaders, in the sixth round. Hodgson said: "As I say, I would have liked to have
a bit more preparation time but that doesn't alter the fact that the incentive
is there and we'll do the best job we can.
"But I can't sit here now and say we will do this, the team will have recovered
and we will play as well as we did today because I don't know if that's
possible. Our game is a physical game. I think to be honest all Premier League
game are high-level, physically intense games and it's hard to recover
afterwards."
Asked which side he thought Sir Alex Ferguson, the Manchester United manager,
would prefer to face, Hodgson said: "I wouldn't have thought he'd be losing too
much sleep over either of us."
Hodgson indicated that he wanted his men, tired as they were, to work harder
than they had done in their 1–1 draw with Swansea in the first FA Cup match, at
the Liberty Stadium.
"I don't think we pressured them as well as we should have done," he said. "We
sat off them a little bit. But they're a very good footballing team and fully
deserved to get a replay and many people argue they should have gone through the
first time."
Hodgson also praised his left-back, Paul Konchesky. "Paul is having a good
season," he said. "He's been giving one solid performance after another. I know
England is quite well off with left-backs but I would like to think Paul would
at least have got his name in [the England manager Fabio Capello's] notebook."