“He shouldn't playing in the division," sighed Sheffield United manager Chris Wilder late last night, as if Fulham had activated some sort of real-life cheat code that unlocked Aleksandar Mitrovic.
“He has made the decision to drop down. Mitrovic is an outstanding player and thankfully we won't be coming up against him in the next 11 games. He's going to the World Cup, Newcastle paid what for him? £15 million? He should be playing in the Premier League.”
Having seen his side pummelled into submission by Fulham’s ultimate act of loan-deal opportunism, Wilder had a solid point. Before being lured to Craven Cottage simply because manager Slavisa Jokanovic’s name popped up on WhatsApp in the last hours of deadline day, Mitrovic’s stalling Premier League career was about to make a sideways move. A deal with Bordeaux was agreed. Then his former club Anderlecht stepped in, and Mitrovic flew to Brussels, only for the collapse of an outgoing transfer to scupper that deal too. The chaos theory of the transfer window worked in Fulham’s favour.
Five weeks, five goals and several standing ovations later, Mitrovic’s decision to take a nominal step down looks to have been a restorative one for his career. Perhaps it’s the sheer turnover of players these days, but the incubation period for a cult hero is often short: in little over a month, Mitrovic has won the hearts and minds of the Fulham support.
A rugged, often awkward-looking striker, tearing around west London, making life miserable for opposition defenders while leading the line with his heart on his sleeve? We may have seen this before somewhere down the Fulham Road.
It certainly helps that Mitrovic has brought goals to go with his gumption. Fulham had already clicked into their current, promotion-hunting gear before he made his debut from the bench against Nottingham Forest on the first weekend in February, but their tidy lateral patterns clearly needed a sturdy spearhead.
“He gives us different options,” Jokanovic told the Independent last week. “We are not talking about the fastest player in this position in the world. But he can hold the ball, we can connect with him. He can be our target man.”
Those last two words carry a distinctly second-tier connotation, but Mitrovic has not been launching himself at aimless long balls. Fulham patiently work the ball left, right and back again - with Tom Cairney and Stefan Johansen the joint conductors - before a channel is finally opened up to feed a pass into the Serb’s feet. Few defenders have had much joy when that happens.
Mitrovic appears to enjoy the bread-and-butter tasks of centre-forwarding. Receiving the ball with his back to goal, Mitrovic immediately fends off the latest bouncer-sized Championship defender by sticking out his backside and acting as a base camp from which the likes of Ryan Sessegnon, Floyd Ayite and Sheyi Ojo are allowed to go streaming up the flanks. Whatever your style of play, Mitrovic appears to be the ideal outlet.
Team play alone isn’t earning him those weekly rounds of Craven Cottage applause, though. The spectacle of Aleksandar Mitrovic could be described as a Crimewatch reconstruction of Diego Costa: chest puffed out, socks at half-mast, limbs more angular than muscular, the same relish for being man-marked, the same crowd-pleasing, front-post desire for the ball when it comes to defending opposition corners.
Newcastle fans are unlikely to be surprised by Mitrovic’s burst out of the Fulham blocks. They witnessed some hit singles almost from the start in 2015 - booked within 22 seconds of his introduction from the bench on his debut, body-slamming Dwight Gayle for the crime of scoring a 96th-minute winner - but Fulham’s love-at-first-sight faithful are enjoying his Greatest Hits, Part 1.
An apparent early elbow from Richard Stearman attempted to set the tone, but Mitrovic simply made a mental note. His two goals killed off Sheffield United in the first half: the first crashed in off the bar from four yards, the second poked home inventively on the half-volley, both celebrated in Stearman’s general direction with a gleefully juvenile flex of the biceps. Anyone who’d arrived with their laminated Aleksandar Mitrovic Bingo Card could already tick off a couple of boxes, but they would eventually leave with full house.
At 3-0 up, with the olé-ing in full flow, he sprinted 20 yards (if that is the word for Mitrovic at full pelt) to clatter - quite legally - into a block tackle, an approach to defending from the front that had recently claimed an innocent linesman as collateral damage.
Finally, with his hopes of a hat-trick fading as Fulham wound down, Mitrovic earned himself an inexplicable booking for shoving over a defender right in front of the referee as he chased the ball one more time. Jokanovic made an instant tactical substitution. “That’s the Serbian way,” he told the Telegraph back in 2016. “That’s the way we approach things, especially in sport. We are a small country, but if we want something, we will fight for it.”
So what next? The playoffs seem the most likely destination, even if Mitrovic’s presence has made Fulham’s charge for an automatic promotion place a sustainable one. Any hopes they might have of retaining him - whichever division they’re in - are likely to be undermined by the spiking of his stock in these barnstorming last few weeks, not to mention his potential impact in the ultimate shop window of the World Cup this summer.
Mitrovic, despite being the personification of on-pitch impatience, has time on his side. He doesn’t turn 24 until September, by which time he should be embarking on his third attempt at establishing himself in the Premier League. If that’s to be in a black-and-white shirt, Fulham fans will hope it is theirs.
