The thrill of the Cup have woken the press up to the fact that Fulham exist. Among all the articles today here is the best, an excellent piece by Henry Winter of The Times following an interview with Jokanovic. It's lengthy but couldn't just post a link: the times being a 'registration only' outlet. However it is well worth a read; being full of snippets like his new contract and his relations with the analytics. "Craven Cottage will be rammed to its historic rafters for the FA Cup this weekend with the visiting Tottenham Hotspur fans taking most of the Putney End, including the neutral section, and Fulham supporters cramming the Hammersmith End, Johnny Haynes Stand and Riverside Stand. “When it’s full, it’s really noisy,” Slavisa Jokanovic says. “I believe our stadium is the best not only in England but in all football.” Fulham’s Serbian manager is rarely given to hyperbole, or romanticism, and has a stare that could freeze blood, but he has clearly fallen in love with the Cottage, so much so that talks are ongoing about extending his contract beyond this season. “It’s an amazing stadium. I enjoy this small dressing room. I enjoy the Cottage. I enjoy watching these stands around me. I know there is so much history around me.” Especially this weekend. Much of their FA Cup history is tied up in derby duels. Fulham played seven qualifying rounds as a Southern League side in 1903/04 before losing to Woolwich Arsenal. Pictures on the wall of the Cottage celebrate Alec Stock’s team playing 11 games to get to Wembley with Alan Mullery and Bobby Moore, before succumbing to West Ham United. In the 2002 semi-final, Fulham fell to John Terry’s strike as Chelsea fans threw celery at Fulham’s then chairman, Mohamed Al-Fayed. Tomorrow, Fulham fans will pour into the Cottage, dreaming of Wembley. “The cup’s special,” Jokanovic continues. “We play at home, it’s sold out, on TV, the best opportunity for promoting our club and ourselves. All the players are aware of the importance of the cup. It’s between 16 teams now, it can be one step [to the quarter-finals], one step [to the semi-finals] and we play at Wembley. We know what a test this will be. We’re playing a top Premier League team who play fantastic football. They have fantastic players and a very good manager.” Jokanovic, a defensive midfielder at Real Oviedo, Tenerife and Deportivo La Coruna in the 1990s, knows Mauricio Pochettino from the latter’s days at Espanyol. “I played against him, many years in Spain. He was a good player,” he says. “He was a centre back, very competitive, like all the Argentinian people with a fantastic mentality. He did a fantastic job as a coach in Espanyol. He was then working well at Southampton, and now at Tottenham. In these few years working here in England, he puts himself in the first level of the world of football managers. I’m very happy because I have a chance to test myself.” His Fulham side lie eighth, six points off the play-offs. “We are fighting for this opportunity to play regularly against top teams, and I expect us to push,” he says. “We played Hull in the FA Cup and Middlesbrough in the League Cup and we were successful. So now we won’t be depressed and think about bad things against Spurs, we think positively. I was satisfied with the commitment of the team in these two games. We’ll put in 100 per cent again. If not, we’re in trouble. I want to push to be at the highest level. I’m full of ambition.” Now 48, Jokanovic has always been driven. He was raised in Novi Sad, on the banks of the Danube, but left before it suffered badly during the Kosovo War in 1999, with its famous bridges bombed. “It was a different time. I was completely safe,” he says. “I grew up in a normal family. My parents were working class. If some rich guy had a bicycle, it was ‘Wow’. “All my friends were sportsmen, we had one ball and we were happy if we found a place to practice with some goals. I was all the time in the street playing football and basketball. My parents educated me in the right way to treat people.” His career has taken him all over from Spain to Israel, Bulgaria to Thailand and England. So where does he consider home? “I am a Serbian guy. My home is there, where I was born but my life brings me in different places. My home is in the world,” he says. “I need to adapt, to start to understand the culture of this people around me. I can make big mistakes. If I start driving here in England like I do in Spain I will very soon have some accident — or finish in jail. Many years ago Chelsea players helped me so much to adapt so when I started coaching at Watford, England wasn’t a new country for me. I know the mentality of the people.” He has always admired English football, tuning in from afar as a kid before gaining the chance to play on historic grounds such as Highbury, when his Deportivo side lost 5-1 in the Uefa Cup in 2000. “When I dream about English football, these kind of stages like Highbury is in my memory,” he says. “I like old-fashioned stadiums. I understand modern football, business, and a modern stadium makes more money than an old stadium. When people talk about Arsenal, I am thinking about Highbury not Emirates. If people say Wembley, I remember the old Wembley.” Plans quicken for a transformed Riverside Stand, taking capacity from 25,700 to 30,000, and with a walkway over the Thames after Fulham bought the vertical rights above the river, much to the annoyance of local sailors concerned about effect on wind. Change happens. Even a traditionalist like Jokanovic welcomes the redevelopment. “Craven Cottage is going to be bigger, and I accept that,” he says. “We want to bring the club to the highest level and I am fighting to be coach there, I am satisfied because I am here now. To be completely happy, I must make people around me, especially supporters, happy.” To improve himself, Jokanovic has spent time observing at close quarters coaches like Diego Simeone, José Mourinho, Pep Guardiola and Carlo Ancelotti. “I watched many, many training sessions of theirs,” he says. “I watched how the top coaches work with the group, manage the situation, leaving players out. People talk about the aesthetics of football but people forget if you play good or bad. It’s focused on whether you’re winning or not.” He craves promotion, although endured the frustration of the club losing Ross McCormack and Moussa Dembélé at the start of the season. “I lost 42 goals. If you ask me what I prefer, I prefer they stayed but, OK, this is part of the football business,” he says. “We lost McCormack because he wanted to change clubs and another club [Aston Villa] made an offer for him. We were happy with the price [£12 million] and decided to make this step.” Dembélé ran down his contract and departed to Celtic. “We make a big mistake,” Jokanovic sighs. “We tried to get him to stay but in this modern life he prefers a different way. We are fortunate we don’t make this mistake with Ryan Sessegnon.” The 16-year-old defender is a much-admired product of Fulham’s productive academy. “He’s a kid who does the job of an adult,’’ Jokanovic says. “He has fantastic potential. He can be very important player in the future for himself, for us and for English football too. But give this kid, this man a chance, be quiet [media], let him improve and understand adult life. Give him a chance to accept everything that starts happening around him. At the moment, he is doing perfect mentally. He’s strong.” Jokanovic has to be patient in team-building. He works with Craig Kline, director of statistical recruitment, who surprisingly vetoed the chance to sign Andreas Pereira on loan from Manchester United despite a reference from Mourinho. Kline is a close friend of Tony Khan, son of owner Shahid, and increasingly powerful at Fulham. Jokanovic trusts as much in checking a player out, watching him live, making calls, finding out about his character, rather than simply staring at a screen, crunching numbers. He also prefers to target players who fill a specific role. “To explain a bit: in my home, if I need a lamp, it is because I don’t have the light,” he says. “I don’t need to buy some chair. They can explain, ‘This chair is fantastic, you can rest very well.’ ‘But I have one chair’.” I know what my team needs.” This allegory flips but echoes Rafa Benítez’s “I was hoping for a sofa and they’ve brought me a lamp” complaint in 2004 when he asked Valencia to buy the striker Samuel Eto’o and they chose Fabián Canobbio, a winger. “It is not a question about a good player or bad player, it is about what this team needs,” Jokanovic continues. “Fulham now cannot buy the best players in the market, but we can find what I believe this team needs. If the club want to follow one kind of method [Kline’s approach to using data], for my side, I accept. For another side, we need to open our mind and understand there is great information in the data, but in traditional way there still exists very good information. We need to find the right level of collaboration.” He looks out of the window at Motspur Park. “I am all day here with my team, and I know better what my team needs. I’ve improved things. The pitches weren’t at a high level at the training ground. It is not enough simply to have pitches that are green, it is about the conditions. We want to play a [passing] style of football so we needed to make some investment. The club perfectly understood this.” The Khans invested £6.5 million into facilities. “Our pitches are now in the perfect situation for us,” Jokanovic says. “I want people to grow with me. I believe I can be better. Being successful with Fulham is my objective right now.”
And the BBC are showcasing erstwhile Fulham fan Richard Osman. Not sure if this will be part of their match build up tomorrow but in case you might miss it going to the match, here he is with the current fad - Fake News or Fact! Video inside this link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/39006468
Article in the Guardian yesterday as well, based on an interview with Marcus Bettinelli: https://www.theguardian.com/football/2017/feb/17/fulham-production-line-dark-days-fa-cup
