Silva: The second half was not a football match

Everton showed up in the capital in a complacent mood, but ran into an inspired Fulham who despite already being relegated, showed a coherent and courageous performance to win 2-0 yesterday.

Speaking after the game, manager Marco Silva was displeased by the effort from his side.

“We are not happy and did not achieve the result we wanted, we did not perform well.

“Now is the moment to prepare for the next game and give a different answer from this afternoon.

“We were in a fantastic run and it is up to us to do everything we can to win the next match.

“We knew playing Fulham would be really difficult. Their position in the table was not important, we knew they would play with pride and character and try to achieve something important for them.

“But we did not start the match well, our first half was not good, even if we had one or two moments in attack and created some problems for them.

“But we were not aggressive enough, with or without the ball. We were not moving the ball fast enough to disorganise them.”

Silva insists though that heads will not flag after this result, especially with Manchester United visiting Goodison Park next Sunday.

“No, the confidence will not be affected, we have to look forward to the next match and analyse and see what we did not do in the right way against Fulham.

“The feedback I gave at half-time was to change our approach but we conceded a goal in the first minute, which was really tough, even if we reacted with some good moments and had some big chances.

“One for Dominic, in particular, which could have changed the match. It looked then like we could equalise but we did not score and in one offensive transition when we were not in a good balance they scored the second goal.

“That made everything more difficult for us… and the second half was tough. There were a lot of stoppages and that made it hard to put intensity and pace into the match.

“Next week will be really tough against a strong side but if we play how we did in the past few weeks, we will be able to achieve a good result.”

The manager also expressed his frustration at the time-wasting antics later on in the game from the hosts.

“We didn’t play football. If everyone came here to watch football, the second half was not a football match.

“There was a lot of stoppages, a lot of playing on the pitch - maybe eight, nine, 10 times the medical staff went onto the pitch, and each five minutes the game was stopped. This is why I say it was not a football game.

”But we didn’t perform the way we wanted to. We produced three fantastic games, but we did not produce a performance today that was at the right level for our club.”