ROSS IS BOSS AS COTTAGERS RUN RIOT!
IT WAS Fulham’s best performance of the season – maybe even the last couple of years – but two-goal hero Ross McCormack believes things can get even better after thrashing local rivals QPR.
There wasn’t even two minutes on the clock when Moussa Dembele got the ball rolling, Ben Pringle doubling the home side’s lead before McCormack added a third before half-time.
Captain McCormack then grabbed his sixth goal in as many games as Fulham ran riot against a QPR side who had hopes of propelling themselves into the play-offs with a win.
And while things went from bad to worse for the visitors when star striker Charlie Austin limped off with what appeared to be a hamstring injury, McCormack is adamant Fulham can start climbing the Championship table.
“We have got Cauley Woodrow coming off the bench who has been playing for England Under-21s, you’ve got Matt Smith who is injured coming back, so there are good options for the manager,” McCormack said.
“And when you’ve got guys like Moussa on form it is hard to leave him out because he is not only scoring goals but he is doing everything the team needs.
“We want to challenge, we have always said play-offs is the aim and we are not going to change that.
“It’s an old cliche but we are just going to take it one game at a time and that is what we are going to do at the minute.
“This is an exciting team as we have a lot of good young players. The manager has added a lot of experienced heads in Richard Stearman,Tim Ream and Andy Lonergan, so it is nice to be a part of and I think we can only get better as the team starts to gel.”
While this was Fulham’s first clean sheet of the league season, they have scored in every game so far and Dembele nodded the home side ahead from a James Husband cross after just 117 seconds.
QPR though could, and perhaps should, have levelled shortly after but Australian international Massimo Luongo side-footed wide when clean through on goal. And Fulham made him pay as they went straight up the other end and Pringle stole the ball and fired into the bottom left-hand corner from the edge of the penalty area.
But they weren’t done there, a flowing move seeing Tom Cairney play in McCormack for the Scot to coolly finish just after half-an-hour.
It was more of the same after the break but Fulham had to wait until an hour had gone to grab a fourth.
And it was McCormack again who poked home after QPR centre-back Gabriele Angella had turned a Ryan Fredericks cross onto his own crossbar.
As well as Austin hobbling off, QPR boss Chris Ramsey has a decision to make with Tjaronn Chery, who walked straight down the tunnel after being subbed after 35 minutes.
“We know we’ve let the fans down,” Ramsey said. “We didn’t compete as we should have done,. Fulham got amongst us very early and their tails were up.We couldn’t get close to them.We haven’t done ourselves justice.
“Doors have been locked; we’ve been in the changing room together. This is the time when we need to stick together. We have to start rebuilding straight away.
“We need to stay positive. We need to stick our chests out and work as hard as we can to get back to winning ways.
“We suffered from making some very basic individual errors in defence and I don’t know any team that can continually deal with that.”