Fulham v. Leeds || the-gorilla Preview

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I've not been able to watch as much football as I'd like to recently (who can?!), so I'm going to preview the games that I'm hoping to watch (if I get time to write them)!

Due to the FA Cup matches, there are only 4 Premier League matches this weekend (all kick off times GMT):
Fri 8pm - Fulham v. Leeds
Sat 8pm - Brighton v. Newcastle
Sun 3pm - West Ham v. Arsenal
Sun 7:30pm - Aston Villa v. Spurs

For me, the pick of the bunch is tomorrow night's game between Fulham and Leeds and I'll get this out of the way now as I've said it a lot - I've been impressed with Fulham lately. Which if you read anything I've written before, you'll already know that.

Fulham

Coming off the back of a heavy loss to Man City last weekend, this is a game that Fulham will look at and think "we need to win this one". The next 3 games could in fact decide their season with games against Leeds and the recently disappointing Villa and Wolves. No matter how well they play, if they don't pick up points in these 3, I fear they're doomed (especially considering the 2 teams they're trying to catch (Brighton and Newcastle) play each other on Saturday).

There aren't any new injuries that I'm aware of so Scott Parker can pick from a settled bunch of players, some of which have been rotated recently too.

Leeds

I spoke in my Fantasy Fotoball Update about the mysterious injury / disappearance of their Centre Back Liam Cooper. For me, all signs are pointing to him having contracted Covid having had his "injury" described as "sickness" and Scotland manager Steve Clarke suggesting he won't travel for their International games without giving any reason. He'll be a miss but Patrick Bamford who went off injured against Leeds is expected to play which would have been a for more significant abscence. In Raphina, they have one of the best players in the Premier League at the moment and if Leeds are to win this, you can be sure that he'll be the player to make it happen.

Leeds had a good result and performance against Chelsea last weekend and like Fulham have had some mixed results including a disappointing defeat against Aston Villa.

So like Fulham, Marco Bielsa has a settled bunch of players to choose from who all know the system and can slot in and out as needed.

The Match

So both sides will have a fairly settled team going into this and the reason I think it'll be such a good game is because neither side will compromise in how they play. Leeds have formed a reputation for fluid attacking football and Fulham's possession based game will be an interesting match up.

Having played each other twice last season, winning 1 game a-piece and Leeds winning the reverse fixture 4-3 earlier this season, this is certainly a difficult game to predict. If we get anything like their previous 3 games, seeing 13 goals, then I'll have chosen which match to watch wisely. (Having said this, Saturday's match report will probably be me writing about a drab 0-0. Definitely 0-0 at Half Time as with most matches I put on!!) With Leeds, you just don't know how their luck will fall on the day and this will perhaps be the deciding factor tomorrow night.

It's a tight one to call and provided Fulham don't make the same silly mistakes that they made against Man City, should be capable enough to get something out of this one. They certainly need to. So I'll optimistically go for a 2-2 draw.