Fulham manager Marco Silva questioned his players’ intensity after they were dumped out of the Carabao Cup by League Two strugglers Crawley.
The newly-promoted Premier League side went down 2-0 on Tuesday night courtesy of goals from Tom Nichols and Liverpool loanee James Balagizi, sparking a pitch invasion at the Broadfield Stadium.
The win was Crawley manager Kevin Betsy’s first in charge since he was hired this summer after previously coaching Arsenal’s under-23s.
Fulham, who are currently sat seventh in the top-flight, made 10 changes for the second-round tie and Silva was not happy with the performance.
“It was a bad performance, definitely, and of course the result as well,” he said. “It puts us out of a competition that we wanted to win.
“Congratulations to them, from the first minute they wanted it more than us, and after that we lost a little bit of control in the game, started to make some mistakes, and they scored, which made it more difficult for us.
“These types of games, we have to show the same enthusiasm, the same intensity that we saw from our opponent.
“We know that when they play against a Premier League club it’s an opportunity for them to show that they can match us. It’s a normal situation.
“I’m not talking about the attitude of my players. It’s just reading the game, to know what’s happened, taking the best decisions, is something that we didn’t do, which created these problems for us.
“Unfortunately we are out of the competition, now we have to analyse it with the players, and look to the next one.”
