Fulham's familiar woes return

Roy Hodgson will utilise the Carling Cup visit to Manchester City on Wednesday to try to find a cure for Fulham's latest bout of travel sickness that threatens to derail his attempts to emulate last season's climb into the Europa League.

The Fulham manager had to endure a 12th trip to the Midlands without victory for his team yesterday as they lost 2-1 at Wolves and unless his players can start to eliminate the individual errors that led to defeat at Molineux, he knows they face a major struggle to repeat their impressive finish of last season.

Hodgson said: "Blatant errors cost us the game at Wolves. Hangeland made an error for the first goal and Dempsey was at fault for the second. We really need to start eliminating those kind of mistakes and that starts with our next game."

Apart from victory on the opening day at Portsmouth, Fulham have been far from certain away from Craven Cottage. After goals from Kevin Doyle and David Edwards for Wolves, a second-half penalty from Danny Murphy was the only bright spot for Hodgson, although he refuses to use the club's Europa League schedule for their lack of consistent League form so far this season.

"No one should be using Europe as any kind of excuse," he added. "All of the players who played against Wolves did not play a part in Europe, apart from John Pantsil. We have a lot more European games to come in the group stages and we need to find a method in how go from Europe to the Premier League and make that work for us."