Fulham: Why pragmatic Brentford offer rivals ideal blueprint for ending yo-yo status as Premier League beckons

It seems a strange thing to say about a team that are now rather limping over the finish line, but it is the emphatic nature with which Fulham have raced towards a Premier League return that is providing most cause for optimism that this time might be different.

Back-to-back defeats - a first for the season - to Coventry and Derby have delayed the confirmation of a third Championship promotion in five years (a statistic which tells you all you need to know about how the other two went). But should Marco Silva’s side finish the job at home to Preston tonight, they will have three-and-a-half months to happily look forward to the start of their latest top-flight campaign and, more importantly, crack on with preparing for it.

It is little surprise that so much stock is being put in that extended window of opportunity, since so many of the failings of Fulham’s last two tilts at the Premier League had roots in decisions taken (or not) during summers shortened by play-off campaigns and then botched by those in charge.

In 2018, a splurge of well over £100million - from which the club are still feeling the FFP ramifications - and 12 new signings failed to produce a functioning team, Slavisa Jokanovic’s side all but doomed by the time he was sacked having taken just five points from their first 12 games.

Two years later, there was a resolve to do things markedly differently, with an appreciable but perhaps naive emphasis on fewer and shrewder acquisitions and more faith placed in the players that had won promotion. The result was four successive defeats to start the campaign, a raft of panicked late-window additions and the writing again already on the wall.

As David Lloyd, founder of Fulham fanzine TOOFIF, puts it: "There