Fulham journalist Jack Collins has been sharing his thoughts on Fulham striker Aleksandar Mitrovic and his current run of form for the west London club.
This comes after Collins recently made an appearance on the latest episode of The Athletic’s Fulhamish podcast, where he spoke about a number of topics concerning Scott Parker’s side.
On the subject of Mitrovic, who came on as a substitute during the second half of Fulham’s midweek 1-0 defeat against Tottenham Hotspur, Collins had this to say about the striker.
He said: “We couldn’t get the ball to stick in the first half, so bringing on Mitrovic felt like the right thing to do in terms of doing that and making it work, but that’s twice now that Aleksandar Mitrovic has come on and really failed to assert himself on the game.
“Now, that’s not really a dig at Mitrovic, it’s more a fact that I think he’s struggling to get into any rhythm off the bench. I think he’s struggling to get into, well, any rhythm full stop, to be perfectly honest – but also, having lost confidence as we think, and being hit with a couple of different things, with [virus] bans and this kind of stop-start nature to the season, I think he’s really found it difficult to get going.
“Now, when you’re bringing him on for sort of 15 minutes to chuck the kitchen sink, it’s not necessarily working in quite the way that we’d hoped.
“I’m hopeful that Scott will continue to try to give him minutes – and I know that sounds a bit weird considering we’ve just said it’s not really working – but I do think he has a part to play in this run-in and this campaign, and to try and get him into some sort of form and shake off that rust a little bit, I think, is going to be important as we get towards the end of the season.”
Fulham originally signed Mitrovic back in the 2018 January transfer window from fellow Premier League side Newcastle United on a loan deal for a fee of £540k before securing him on a permanent deal in the following summer window in a deal worth a reported fee of £22.23 million.
Overall, the 26-year-old, who is currently valued at £19.8 million, has made a total of 124 appearances for Fulham prior to their Premier League clash against Liverpool, managing to score 52 goals and provide 11 assists along the way (per Transfermarkt).
TIF Thoughts on Jack Collins’ comments on Mitrovic…
So far this season, the Serbian has made 20 appearances for Fulham in the Premier League, starting 10 of them, scoring two goals in the process.
With Mitrovic having only made two passes against Tottenham with a passing accuracy percentage of 50% – the joint-lowest of any Fulham player on the night (per WhoScored) – this shows that on this occasion, he failed to make any sort of significant impact on the game when he came on, which could suggest that he is not suited to making cameo appearances in games and could be better off starting them instead.
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Moving forward, it will be interesting to see whether or not Parker decides to start Mitrovic in any of Fulham’s remaining league games this season.
In our view, if Mitrovic can put in a solid performance in any game he gets the chance to start in, then this will certainly put him in a good place for him to potentially start getting his form back and help his team avoid the drop back to the Championship.