BEES SEEK BUZZ
Columnist Gregor Robertson looks at what lowly Brentford need to do...
WHAT on earth is going on at Brentford? One win in 15 Championship games prior to the visit of Bolton at the weekend. Eight defeats in ten since Thomas Frank took the reins.
The Bees were sitting pretty in second in mid-September but, pre-weekend, had nosedived to 19th, three points above the relegation zone.
Now, in mitigation, it has been a chastening few months for the west Londoners. Dean Smith was poached by Aston Villa. The tragic passing of Robert Rowan, their 28-yearold technical director, rocked the club to their core.
And injuries to key players like Ollie Watkins, Romaine Sawyers and Said Benrahma have blunted their dynamic attack during much of this barren run.
Nevertheless, it is becoming increasingly hard to shake the feeling that Frank is living on borrowed time.
I’ve been present for a few of his post-match press conferences this season and he’s a likeable guy, in a kind of amiable supply teacher kind of way.
Evidently, though, he’s a talented coach and the 45-yearold has been honing his craft in his homeland since his early 20s. He managed Denmark’s under-16s, 17s and 19s before taking on his first senior managerial role with Brondby in 2013, where he oversaw third and fourthplaced finishes in the Danish Superliga.
He joined Brentford as assistant coach in 2016, and knows the way things are done (a little differently) at Griffin Park, so you can see why the continuity option was attractive when Smith left in October.
Unfortunately, such appointments rarely pan out all that smoothly. Frank talks about fine margins, individual defensive errors, and there is some truth in that.
He points to all but one of their defeats being by a single goal. And it is true that most weeks they dominate the ball and often have the highest possession, passing accuracy and attempts on goal stats of any team in the Championship.
But an increasingly callow and soft-centred looking team have now lost more games from winning positions than any other team in the Championship.
Not even the fabled “justice table” they use at Griffin Park, which measures the performance data beneath cold, hard results, offers any succour as they have plummeted half-a-dozen places in the Expected Goals differential league in the past two months.
Plummeted
Brentford have often felt like a breath of fresh air since winning promotion to the Championship in 2014, securing four top-ten finishes and playing a dynamic brand of football that has won plenty of admirers.
Matthew Benham, the former professional gambler and owner of the statistical-analysis company Smartodds, has ploughed more than £100 million into the Bees and there were genuine ambitions of reaching the Premier League in time for the move to a new 17,250-seater stadium near Kew Bridge in 2020.
Co-directors of football Rasmus Ankersen - who is also chairman of FC Midtjylland, the Danish Superliga club owned by Benham - and Phil Giles, a maths graduate with a PhD in physics, lead a team who seek to out-think their more affluent opponents and their admirable data-driven recruitment model has yielded player sales of almost £50 million since 2014. Undoubtedly, they get far more right than wrong.
Their appointment of head coaches, though, has not been without its issues. Many were quick to sneer when Mark Warburton was effectively shown the door after leading the club out of League One and securing a place in the Championship play-offs in 2015.
They sneered when his relatively unknown replacement, Marinus Dijkhuizen, was dismissed after only two wins in nine games.
Smith arrived and bought into the Brentford way, but he was also a gnarly lower league centre-half in his day, a leader with a flash of devilment in his locker – trust me, I saw it when I played against his Walsall teams.
Richard O’Kelly, his longterm assistant, is a wily old fox, too. It feels like Brentford are missing their presence and that, perhaps, the job they did was even a little under-appreciated. Both felt a little bit like outsiders in a club of footballing nonconformists. And maybe that is what Brentford really need to balance the ship? Without wishing to sound like an old-school “Football Man”, it looks for all the world like there is a dearth of some of the organic, immeasurable human characteristics that football will always rely upon. Experience. Authority. Leadership. Perhaps that is why Kevin O’Connor, who played 500 times for Brentford, was promoted from his role as B-team head coach to first team assistant coach last week. Unfortunately, though, those traits are severely lacking on the pitch, too. Chris Mepham and Ezri Konsa are two fine 21-year-old centre-halves but they look like rabbits in the headlights of late.
They’re not alone, but they need some help. Smith, you may recall, scrapped the captaincy in favour of a leadership group at the beginning of the season after John Egan left for Sheffield United. It was billed their latest progressive move.
Progressive
“I’m not sure the model of having one captain fits within football now,” Smith said. “Sometimes when you have a captain you end up with more followers than leaders, and we want to create leaders.”
Well, it hasn’t worked, that’s for sure. Having one of the youngest squads in the Championship, with a current average age of just over 24, makes for an exciting team but it leaves you a little short when the going gets tough.
With January just round the corner, most clubs looking anxiously at the league table will be eagerly awaiting the transfer window opening to buttress their squads.
Brentford, though, have a few of the most saleable assets in the division. If valuations of the likes of Sawyers, Neal Maupay or Watkins are met, history would suggest they’ll be on their way. And any arrivals will follow the same tried and tested formula – young, lower league or overseas players ripe for development, who will appreciate in value, but who are unlikely to have much experience of a Championship relegation battle.
They need to find some leadership from somewhere. And, unfortunately, that may not bode well for Thomas Frank.