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'Disappointed' boss hails Rovers fans

Sun 06 Jan, 07:15 PM


Bristol Rovers boss Paul Trollope saluted his team and their "immense" fans after holding Fulham to a 2-2 draw in third-round of the FA Cup.Fulham confirmed that League One Rovers brought over 7,000 supporters to the Thames-side stadium, completely filling one end of the ground.

And, although Trollope - who spent five years at Fulham as a midfielder and won nine caps for Wales - gave his players due credit for a sterling performance he admitted: "Those supporters were immense - as usual.

"They give us backing like that every week even though they are not crammed into one area like that at The Memorial Stadium and they will be well up for the replay.

"We've done what people call the hard bit and brought Fulham back for the replay but I don't pretend they are still not favourites.

"But we are actually a little bit disappointed to have come out with only a draw after leading twice and I think we should be very hopeful of landing the cup shock on our own ground under lights. It should be a great night."

Rovers will have suspended skipper Stuart Campbell and several other key men back for the replay a week on Tuesday and Trollope admitted: "I've got some selection problems because we were without quite a few players but the ones who stood in did a magnificent job.

"It's still a great result for us, but the players are pleased rather than jubilant because they know that on the day we could easily have won it.

"We were under a lot of pressure at times and our keeper made some good saves but most of the time our players dropped into the right holes and made the right decisions.

"These are huge games for lower division clubs and some of the bigger sides give you a chance by resting players in the FA Cup, but that wasn't quite the case.

"Fulham had some big-name players out there and although they may be struggling at the moment they've got a new manager and are all keen to impress."

Fulham twice had to come from behind after Danny Coles' deflected shot in only the third minute and Craig Hinton's powerful header on 65 minutes put Rovers in front.

David Healy equalised before half-time but there were only 16 minutes left when Danny Murphy struck a spectacular equaliser.

Yet new Fulham boss Roy Hodgson preferred to draw positives from only his second game in charge since replacing sacked Lawrie Sanchez.

The former Inter Milan, Blackburn and Finland boss said: "Sometimes you have to look a little bit beyond results and see exactly what happened.

"All I've said to the players is that they have no reason to feel ashamed of that performance in any way.

"They have done well to come back twice from being a goal behind - especially after the cold shower of being one down after only two minutes.

"I know some people will look at the result and say Fulham have been held to a draw by a League One team but what I saw was players showing a strong attitude and commitment, a desire to try to play their way back.

"A foundation, to some extent, was laid that I can work on. Nobody is under any illusions about an awful lot of work to be done and it is not going to be put right day-to-day. It will take a period of time.

"We've got a while now to work on the players and put right what we see as the wrongs. One obvious one is that the two games in which I've been here we have conceded four goals from set-plays.

"Today we couldn't clear a throw-in that bounced around the area and a straightforward free-kick in the air. We are not a big team but we've got to do something about that.

"But I never saw a scenario where we would lose the game and the way we played for 20 minutes before the

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