What a slow week. No football for Brentford beyond the forthcoming game at Wolves to look forward to. Whilst our next opponents have had two trips to Newcastle United in the space of four days to (hopefully) run down the energy levels a bit, the Bees have had that 5-0 win home over Preston followed by, well, nothing. My Twitter has been wall to wall tears and questions about the Great British Bake Off (which we’ll get to, briefly, where possible new hosts are named) and not much more.
Of course, Wolves will be in high spirits following their last league trip, that 2-0 win at Newcastle that probably surprised just about everybody outside of the Black Country. Indeed, manager Walter Zenga was quoted afterwards as saying, “the spirit of the team, how they approached the game, how they started the game, how they played is a big answer to everybody.”.
Priced at just £1.99, all sales are being donated to the Brentford FC Community Sports Trust.
Likewise any sales from the previous titles – Celebrating like they’d won the FA Cup (2013/14), Tales from the football village (2014/15) and Ready. Steady. Go Again. (2015/16) – are also now going to the BFCCST.
Containing the least bad of the blogs from May 2016 to May 2017 along with a smattering of new material, you can pick it up, here. Its all for a great cause and,hey, you may even enjoy it…..
Zenga in his playing prime
A stunning programme cover – grab yours at the ground
Judy and Anton – you can’t buy chemistry like this
Fire up the old Brentford. Matthew Benham is back. On Twitter that is. Whilst he has already returned after a brief mid-season hiatus, Wednesday saw him teasing us with another spin of the ‘cryptic clue generator’. On a day in which this column bemoaned the Charlton Athletic school of comms, it made a refreshing change to see Matthew at his fan teasing best .
What does it all mean? Of course his use of a video clip is traditionally associated with somebody new coming in to Griffin Park. That said, his clues are as hard to understand and unravel as Claudia Winkleman doing the maths on Countdown. Even when you know the answer.
So what can we learn from this? Is somebody coming in today? Certainly, Dean Smith has been very vocal about his desire to dip into the loan market.But any attempt to translate the sequence has , so far, proved as futile as going into a fierce London derby, away from home, with no strikers in your starting XI.
The clip is the Doctor Knee sketch, from Chris Morris’s series Jam. Soundtracked by Brian Eno, it features actors David Cann & Amelia Bullmore ( best known for playing Sonja,the Ukranian girlfriend of TV’s Alan Partridge – Don’t get Bond wrong !).
But watching the video for a scripted clue or a lead from one of the main names has, as ever, proven pointless. The only Chris Morris I know, in a footballing sense, is now in his 50s and no longer troubling the good people at Panini.
Then it hit me. What if Matthew has changed his modus operandi and is hinting at something else? Assuming we aren’t signing a player with an injured knee (when would we ever do something like that?) this could mean one of two other possibilities.
1 – That Scott Hogan is in line for a recall on Saturday following his well documented stint with the Griffin Park medical team. Has that period officially come to an end? Whilst, surely, too soon might we see him make a cameo from the bench? After all, he has been increasing his playing time for the development squad.
2 – That it may be somebody leaving us. The final scene of the sketch see the patient going through the ‘out’ door. If not the case of Scott leaving the doctor’s surgery, perhaps a departure (player or staff; on or off field) is imminent at Brentford? But who? And replaced by……?
Brian Little in for Rasmus or Phil as co-director of football? A rejig in the comms team? Peter Gilham finally hanging up his microphone?
I can’t see any of those happening and, besides, I’m normally as off target as Nick Proschwitz when it comes to unravelling Matthew’s clues.
Instead, we’ll await any update on Brentford official with intrigue. Then fail miserably to backwards translate
Chris Morris is now past the prime of his 1988 heyday – playing wise
Brentford take on Charlton this Saturday, hoping for more of the same after cruising to a 3-0 victory at the Valley back in October. That result saw Addicks manager Guy Luzon, erm, losing his job immediately afterwards and the Bees put in as one sided a performance as we’ve seen all season – even moreso than Wolves last Tuesday .
It was a game which had been completely at odds with Luzon’s first matchin charge of Charlton, their 3-0 win over Brentford that came at the height of last season’s Village-gate affair. That was a woeful performance from the Bees which, despite Warbs denial at the time, seemed to suggest a squad in disarray with just one thing – their manager’s future – as a point of focus. Thankfully, the Bees picked themselves up from that and confounded the expectations of most onlookers to make the play-offs. Where normal service resumed .
Last season, Village gate saw a real low at Charlton
And, of course, we couldn’t take this briefest of looks at recent encounters without a nod to Tommy Smith. It was he whose late equaliser secured a point in our first ever Championship game – the season opener at Griffin Park back in August 2014. How the place erupted and then gasped as Alan Judge almost stole a late winner, hitting the crossbar with a freekick taken deep in Saunders Territory.
So in 18 months our three games have turned out as D,L and W. What will it be on Saturday?
Dean Smith spoke yesterday in an article on the official site where they did their wonderful trick of warming us up for the quote by giving us the quote, noting: Dean said the only target for the team between now and the end of the season is to win as many matches as possible. If anybody was in any doubt, the next line proved this as readers were advised, “We don’t want to target this or that but our aim is just to finish as high as we can and to win as many games as we can,” said Dean.
Dean went on to add that he hoped to “get that winning mentality back” . It looked like that might happen after the Wolves game before normal service resumed at Rotherham United. 2 wins out of 11 in 2016 are a poor run for Dean and I would question that to get something back, does he not have to have had it in the first instance ?
Then again, if we play like we did against Wolves anything is possible whilst Charlton’s confidence must be as low as that of the team behind the forthcoming Ghostbusters movie. The trailer for this being universally panned upon release yesterday and the unfunniest thing I had the misfortune to sit through all week. At least, until I saw Claudia Winkleman standing in for everbody’s favourite mathematical model, Rachel Riley, on ‘8 out of 10 cats does Countdown’ last night.
How can it be THIS bad?
Still, it has been a week generally filled with more disappointment than a post match press conference for the development squad (whatever the score, the interviewee always seems ‘disappointed’). Ghostbusters and Winkleman aside, Saturday saw that game at Rotherham United whilst Sunday saw the worst ever James Bond theme, Sam Smith’s title track from the otherwise excellent Spectre, pick up an Oscar. This, an effort so bad it had ousted Madonna’s ‘Die another day’ from the bottom of the ‘Best Bond’ list yet here it was being honoured in the most public of fashions.
Sometimes, life just isn’t fair. As Dean Smith would recognise, performances don’t always get what they are due. Let’s just hope that tomorrow we do what, honestly, we should. With a trip to Loftus Road the following weekend, we need everybody brim full of confidence.
Fingers crossed that Saturday is more Rachel Riley than Claudia Winkleman.
artists impression of a mathematical model etc etc
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