Silva says all Fulham players must score goals

Marco Silva insisted the responsibility for Fulham’s recent slump in the absence of talismanic striker Aleksandar Mitrovic is shared between all the players.

Mitrovic was handed an eight-match ban after being sent off during Fulham’s FA Cup defeat at Manchester United last month after putting his hand on referee Chris Kavanagh.

The Serbia international received a standard three-match ban, but that was extended by three games for violent conduct towards a match official and another two for using certain language.

Fulham had already lost two matches before the FA Cup clash, but have continued on their downward trend, suffering five successive defeats in all competitions, but a bigger problem has been the lack of goals.

Since Mitrovic’s red card, Fulham have netted just once, and suffered defeats against relegation battlers Bournemouth and West Ham, but Silva wants to shift the focus away from secondary striker Carlos Vinicius.

“We are working on it (goalscoring) of course. It’s important for us to keep finding different solutions for our players,” Silva said.

“Of course, as you know, instead of Mitro we have Carlos who is a striker who can play there.

“The main person for the position is of course Carlos but we have other solutions that we can work with.

“To score the goals is much more than just the striker – we have to share the responsibility between the striker, the players around the striker, the offensive midfielders, all the players that are normally used to create chances and score goals.

“Last week we played all around, it was probably one of the ones where we created quite a few chances from the sides, with crosses but we didn’t provide in the best way.

“Even if Vini didn’t perform at his best level in the last game, it is not fair to put just the focus on Carlos Vinicius, because all the other players around should have the responsibility to try and score as well.

“Of course it’s not something that we are really concerned about but it is something that we are working on because with so much control in the game we have to create more and score more goals because the game we had last week we should have won instead of lost.”