On a night of smiles all round, the broadest grin of all was worn by the matchwinner.
Held aloft by Calvin Bassey and mobbed by his team-mates, Harry Wilson beamed. He had snatched a place in the top half of the Premier League out of Brentford’s hands and catapulted Fulham to ninth themselves. His two injury-time goals seized victory from the jaws of defeat.
Craven Cottage under the floodlights can be some spectacle, and so was this Fulham performance to boot. Sure, it came in dramatic, turnaround circumstances, but a 2-1 win did not flatter Marco Silva’s men in the slightest. Victory for the first time since late September.
Led by a genuinely underrated manager and powered by a superb recruitment policy which has identified value to be extracted from players who had lost their way elsewhere - Bernd Leno, Alex Iwobi, Adama Traore, Emile Smith Rowe - Fulham continue on an upward trajectory of continued growth. Who knows where it can take them.
Plenty expected Fulham to be immediately relegated when Silva brought them up for the 2022-23 season. Instead they finished 10th, then 13th last season but having played better football than the previous campaign. Now they are just four points off third-place Nottingham Forest.
It said a lot on Monday night that after his side had entered stoppage time ahead and ended it defeated, Brentford boss Thomas Frank could still openly admit that: “It is fair to say on the day the better team won.”
Fulham had indeed been stronger, enjoying 67.6 per cent of possession and firing off 26 shots to the five of their west London rivals.
“We’ve been the best team on the pitch in most of our games, but the reality is we didn’t always get the points”, Silva reflected. “Tonight was more or less the same story.”
Fear of another undeserved defeat explained why Silva for so long cut a despondent figure - not angry, just disappointed. Then came Wilson’s breathtaking flick and stooping header.
“We didn’t give up”, Silva said. “I told the players we had to keep pushing hard. We were rewarded. Sometimes football takes from you - but in the end it’s going to give to you if you deserve it. Everyone wants to win, but it pleases me more when we deserve it.”
Fulham are in many ways becoming the Southampton of five or 10 years ago and the Brighton of now: nabbed each summer of their finest players but able to reinvent themselves without tumbling down the table. Are Fulham worse for having lost Aleksandar Mitrovic, Joao Palhinha and Tosin Adarabioyo? They don’t seem to be.
Silva has been overlooked for vacancies at the top clubs for so long now, and Fulham have benefited by holding onto one of the league’s very best tacticians.
The Portuguese explained that he moved Iwobi to the right wing despite a man-of-the-match performance from a central position against Everton last weekend in order to allow Smith Rowe and Reiss Nelson to combine down the left.
It worked to a tee. “It was a great first half from him”, Silva said of Nelson’s first Premier League start for Fulham. Mads Roerslev was rightly targeted and an overload down that flank gave the hosts joy all night. Nelson came off, Wilson came on, and that proved the belated undoing of the stubborn but outplayed visitors.
There is now genuine competition for places in Fulham’s attack. Nelson, Smith Rowe, Wilson, Traore and Iwobi are competing for three places in the team, and, further forward, Rodrigo Muniz and Raul Jimenez for one. And there seem so few weak links. Antonee Robinson and Sander Berge were superb against Brentford - the latter is just the latest shrewd signing.
The only shame is that more supporters could have been there to witness the football Silva’s Fulham are concocting at Craven Cottage if it were more affordable. Tickets were being advertised as late as Monday evening, because adult seats in the Riverside Stand started at £100 each.
Those who did make that short walk along the Thames were treated to one of Fulham's most dominant displays of the season, and that would have been true even without Wilson’s showstopping double.
Ever the professional, Silva had already composed himself by the time he arrived for his press conference after the game.
“We have a session tomorrow morning; they are not going to have enough time to enjoy [this win], because we are going to be at the training ground at 9:30am.”
Fulham are ninth in the table, above Manchester United and Newcastle, with more than a quarter of the season gone. Totally reasonable, then, to ask their manager what might be possible this season. A top-half finish? Europe?
“What’s possible is to work hard,” he said. “That is what we can promise.”
