Fulham boss Marco Silva revealed that his team targeted Marc Cucurella and Pedro Neto during their Premier League 2-1 victory over Chelsea at Stamford Bridge on Boxing Day.
Cole Palmer opened the scoring for Chelsea in the 16th minute.
But Fulham equalised through substitute Harry Wilson and extended their lead thanks to Rodrigo Muniz’s late goal.
“I expected that with Adama [Traore] knowing that Cucurella was going to be more inside, or Cucurella was going to be the second midfielder for them or play in the pocket, we wanted to play with a player like Adama to exploit that space when they are more exposed on that left-hand side, and we wanted to exploit Cucurella’s position; that was the reason behind it,” Silva told Amazon Prime.
“The reason is that we wanted to exploit the fact that the full-back [Cucurella] was more inside, and we had the profile of Adama there. Of course, it worked really well.”
He added: “We tried to expose Robinson against [Pedro] Neto; we knew Madueke or Neto were going to do this, and we clearly tried to expose Neto against Robinson every time, and we did it.”