Team Focus: Meulensteen Dismissed Just as Recovery Began at Fulham

Perhaps the attempt is futile. Maybe we should just accept that there is no logic to what Shahid Khan has done at Fulham, that sacking two managers in a season, lurching from one style of football to another, is just a thing that rich men do and that to try to spy deeper meaning is pointless. Perhaps we could even make allowances and say that, if you think you have made a major mistake in appointing a manager sticking with him merely compounds the error.

Yet it does seem strange to have sacked Rene Meulensteen so soon after a January transfer window in which they brought in seven players and offloaded eight, and, more particularly, after two games in which they took a point off Manchester United and then were within a couple of minutes of drawing against Liverpool. However disappointing Meulensteen's time in charge as a whole, he could legitimately argue that he had just reshaped the squad to his thinking and had got them playing well when the axe fell.

As a whole Meulensteen's reign was deeply disappointing. He and Jol were both in charge for 13 games this season. Both won three games and drew one, and both had the third-worst record of any Premier League side in that period. They did score four more goals under Meulensteen, but they also conceded 10 more.

In many key indicators there was little difference between Jol and Meulensteen. Possession remained virtually unchanged - 44.3% under Jol to 44.5% under Meulensteen; pass completion dropped slightly, from 81.3% to 79.1%. Tackles and interceptions went up a little under Meulensteen, from 16.6 and 12.7 per game under Jol to 17.3 and 14.3 per game. That hints at a little more urgency, a team more focused on winning the ball back, and that in turn perhaps suggests the type of football Meulentseen was moving towards - although the drop-off in pass-completion and the resulting need to win the ball back more is perhaps also a factor.

But the big change under Meulensteen was in shots and shots on target per game. Under Jol, Fulham managed only 8.1 shots per game, the worst figure in the league; under Meulensteen that rose to 13.8 per game. Shots on target showed a similar rise, from 2.8 to 5.0 per game - that latter figure the seventh best in the league. Similarly, shots conceded per game - although the goals conceded figure increased - went down under Meulensteen, from 19.8 per game to 17.5. That was still the fourth-worst record in the league, but it was at least an improvement.

Shots, of course, are in themselves a slippery statistic - as Tottenham showed early in the season, it doesn't mean much having more shots than anybody else in the league if a lot of them are speculative long-rangers. But the fact that Fulham's shots on target were going up

and that they were reducing the number of shots their opponent had suggests things might have been moving in the right direction under Meulensteen and that 75 days probably weren't enough to judge him.

The appointment of Felix Magath is an intriguing one. Given he won the league as recently as 2009 - and with a team as unfashionable as Wolfsburg - it's slightly mystifying that he's been out of work for 18 months, seemingly written off as a dinosaur. He believes in rigorously drilling his players - he even had a special hill built at the Wolfsburg training ground so he could drive players up slopes of various gradients - but that in itself does not mean his ideas are outdated. The worry, though, must be that fitness work of the intensity Magath insists upon is best done in pre-season: it's hard to see how he could up the workload at this stage of the season without risking burnout.

Perhaps he will be able to inject some energy that adds momentum to the work Meulensteen had already done. A four-point gap to safety is not unbridgeable. You do wonder, though, what effect the constant turmoil must be having, and also, whether a budding renaissance may have been stifled just as it was beginning.

Can Fulham survive? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below