Having gone winless in your first six games and conceded goals at a rate of almost two a game, there are worse ways to recover than a pair of gritty 1-0 victories. It is still early days in the Alvaro Arbeloa project at Fulham but the optimism that a narrow but entertaining opening-weekend 3-2 defeat to Chelsea had brought from his debut in the dugout had waned with that run, which had left them stranded bottom of the Premier League. That openness which had initially seemed a welcome tonic from the sometimes pragmatic Marco Silva era had quickly become a problem, with the Cottagers losing 3-2 again - this time to previously winless Crystal Palace - and shipping two late goals to Ipswich earlier this month to lose at Portman Road too.
Something had to change, and after six league games with his players Arbeloa felt he had seen enough to know where that lay. "We have been learning from our mistakes, and obviously we are a team in a process," he tells Sky Sports. "We are improving, we're working hard and for us to be a very solid team is so important.
"Of course, I have to adapt to my players - they are the most important thing. It's not just about my ideas, it's about them and their qualities, their talent. "We're not the best team in open games, we're much better controlling the ball, the transitions.
We're a much better team in this way. "You can only control what you can control. That's what you want to do.
We cannot control what our opponents want to do but we have been learning and improving, working on our mistakes. "We can be aggressive when we press, but sometimes you need to drop into a low block or a medium block. There are moments for everything in a game.
At the end of the day, we have to be a complete team. "In every process there are some ups and downs. That's normal, but we're on the right track." Please use Chrome browser for a more accessible video player Conceding an average of 1.69xG per game was never going to be sustainable.
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