Willian urges struggling Fulham to ensure fine season does not end on downer after fifth straight defeat

Fulham midfielder Willian has challenged his team-mates to rediscover their “best level” across the final two months of the season in a bid to stop their campaign petering out.

The Cottagers were beaten 1-0 at home by relegation-threatened West Ham on Saturday, with an own-goal from the unfortunate Harrison Reed the difference between the two sides.

The result made it five successive defeats for Marco Silva’s side since the start of last month, a run which has seen them knocked out of the FA Cup at the quarter-final stage and lose ground in the race for an unlikely European place.

Despite their poor form, Fulham remain in the top half of the table and have no concerns over another immediate return to the Championship but Willian insists they cannot allow complacency to set it.

“We will try to improve in training and will look to win the games ahead,” he said. “We have been good this season, and played some good football.

“And we want to get back to our best level. Of course we don’t want the season to end on a down, nobody wants that. We want to doing good things, and get back to that.”

Fulham dominated possession against a West Ham side who set up to hit them on the counter-attack, but struggled to create clear openings, with Lukasz Fabianski enjoying a relatively comfortable afternoon in the visiting goal until making a superb intervention to deny Andreas Pereira late on.

The hosts were without Aleksandar Mitrovic, who was serving the second game of an eight-match ban, leaving former Tottenham forward Carlos Vinicius to lead the line.

“Aleksandar is a good player, a great player for us,” Willian said of the Serbian’s absence. “But yeah, we have players with whom we can find a way to play well still and win games.

“With Vinicius we tried hard to move the ball and have contact with him – sometimes we didn’t do that. But we created some chances, playing between the lines.

“He made a great pass to Andreas. But it’s a part of football sometimes – it can just not be your day, and then other times it is.”