Premier League fun
Brentford is the best team to watch in the Premier League and their match with Newcastle over the weekend proved it once again.
There are good matches, there are not so good matches, there are bad matches. In sport and in the Premier League you get the full spectrum. It’s inevitable. Which is why the good ones, or rather the most fun ones, should always be celebrated. Or at the very latest recognized as such. To not lose perspective of good and bad. To not have our senses stunted. Allowing therefore for our senses to be properly heightened, with a gust of elation, when the game is as good and as fun as Brentford vs Newcastle was.
Beaten down, raided and picked apart. Over time it feels insurmountable to fend off higher-powered threats in the Premier League, and in football more generally, that will just come knocking at the door of your training facilities and end up signing your best players and your manager when you’re a midtable overachiever. Brentford have been exactly that for three years now and are still going strong. Precisely because of how long the core of this team has been allowed to remain together, strengthening their football bond. If you told me Pinnock, Henry, Norgaard, Janelt, Jensen, Mbeumo and Wissa (3 of which didn’t even play against Newcastle) have been playing together for 10 years, I’d believe you.
Brentford have been in the league for double the amount of time and that is relevant, but Brighton are the closest homologue to them in the Premier League. The links they share, from their organizational philosophies all the way to their respective owners hating each other from sort of dispute from their poker days, is something inextricable. So comparisons become logical mental exercises from the outside looking in. Brighton have lost eventually everyone. Part of that has been the natural growth and replenishment of the squad, going from relegation battlers to European football contenders. But Brentford, again, in roughly half the seasons, have not seen their squad beaten down, raided and picked apart. And Brighton have been more than handsomely paid to go through that experience, despite the dramatic choice of language to describe it. It’s interesting to observe the differences.
Whereas Brighton have gone through the signing and selling of Yves Bissouma, Moisés Caicedo, Alexis Mac Allister, Marc Cucurella… Brentford have built, and maintained and solidified their standing in the Premier League by having a team of Pascal Grosses. Players endlessly reliable but at the same time of not very apparent high ceilings. And they’ve made it work. Brentford have seen three important players in these last three seasons. One, their goalkeeper, had already been replaced before being transferred to Arsenal and then another two; both passed their moment in time of absolute physical prime by the time of selling. As a matter of fact, one of them had essentially come back from the dead in Christian Eriksen. The other seemed not completely but still inevitably bereft of their touch, of their former magic. That is Ivan Toney. By the time that they pulled the trigger, this last summer, the club was perhaps the most interested party in having him sold, since it was going to be for 50 million pounds and far away to Saudi Arabia no less. They were gonna get paid, he was gonna get paid and perhaps rediscover his scoring prowess in an easier league. But what was key underneath all of the hoopla was the fact the core kept becoming more robust, more solid, more resilient. Those guys left but took almost nothing with them. Anything that’s dead shall be regrown, big or small, and football-wise that’s exactly what has happened at the Gtech Community Stadium. It all allowed for further growth of the team. Which is what was on full display against Newcastle this past Saturday.
The opening exchanges were a sort of point of no return. The vibrancy was adequate for what was about to happen. A sloppy, powerful, enthralling goal-fest. This game was good. If someone with greater sensitivity for tactical technicalities disagrees, they are free to do so. But I’m not having any disparagement of this game. It was perfect in its imperfectness. I left in love with it. A brief, fleeting summer love but about a football game in the middle of December. It was good in all the ways that it needed to be. The mix of ingredients was somewhat excentric and bombastic but somehow still perfectly balanced. Although one of the key main ingredients was precisely the lack of one very precise one: good defensive play. Like a musical ghost note. It was there, but its purpose was its mutedness. Fabian Schär and Dan Burn on one side and Nathan Collins and Ethan Pinnock on the other. They were all definitely there. But they were there to contribute to the game’s quality of rhythm. Not to have any discernable pitch.
Two pairs of centre-backs, none of which found in the biting London cold their day to shine; but neither did their overall defensive structures. It was all wobbly, for both teams. The sturdiness was never really there until the second half of the game found tired legs but also a greater sense of defensive capability. When Newcastle needed it most is when they found it least. Which is to say the opposite for Brentford’s defense, the muted notes, in crunch time, finally producing a relevant pitch. That was probably the most revelatory part of it all: seeing Brentford be able to hold down the ship when the storm was coming and could have flipped over in the open oceans of Premier League football. Vikings by the name of Alexander Isak not having the force, the wherewithal or simply the mystical magic to drag Newcastle back to shore. But before Eddie Howe’s boys had been gripped by ultimate doom, gloom and defeat, the game, again, had been a marvelous flow of back and forth sparkly-ness. One that was once equally enticing and hopeful for both teams’ aspirations. That was until Newcastle, Newcastle of all teams, didn’t have the firepower to match.
But a match was almost immediately lit from the first blowing of the whistle. In Newcastle’s intrinsic and messier by the day chaos of a midfield, it was Christian Norgard who got possession of the ball and disposed himself in service of an imperfectly decent pass to Bryan Mbeumo. Completely out of sync, on the back foot trying to recover, it all was too fast for Newcastle defense and Lewis Hall’s capacity or lack thereof to stop Mbeumo in the fast-approaching mano-a-mano was almost their only hope. Liberated, as he always is on the field of perceptions of him not being as good as he actually is, approaching more defenders and more danger of squandering it all as he drove towards the center lanes to find a better angle from which to shoot, Mbeumo finally executed the shot ferociously and marvelously to score and put Brentford ahead.
The tepid nature of the defending that this game was ought to provide soon switched ends and Brentford were immediately sort of coordinated and organized amongst each other but the whole disposition remained funky and subtly discombobulated; ordered but simultaneously comfortably open for Jacob Murphy to facilitate things to happen. More precisely, a bit of an awkward ball that Nathan Collins decided to make a duel of anticipation and heading precision – missing badly and Alexander Isak being the sniper to head the awkward dart towards the bull’s eye. Roughly three minutes from one score to the other. Buckle up tighter, if you need to. The adrenaline, the loose fun, the unrigorous defending, the conceptual slipperiness that never permitted either team to get a good hold of midfielding operations. It was a barren land in which to transit, in which Bruno Guimaraes would remain excessively busy, pointing, ever-approaching, but everything permanently out of step within his team.
Newcastle just could not get fully going, ever. No way found of imposing themselves on a team of supposedly much lesser talent. And then came the talentless-ist moment of them all when Harvey Barnes, a vibes and action player if there ever was one, set up a horrible backward horizontal pass across the center of their own field that was, incidentally, perfect for Brentford to pick up and pounce on. Which wasn’t a total accident as Newcastle would find themselves time and again stuck in their own half in this game. But what preceded that error, nevertheless, was the sense of the Magpies getting into next gear, finding ways to agitate, to possibly wrestle Brentford down. But no. If Mbeumo had made relatively light work of his scoring appearance, Yoane Wissa would make even easier work of Fabian Schär, instantly in the palm of his hand, or rather hypnotized to the ball at his feet. Before he knew it, Wissa had matched the doings of his partner in crime against the Pope. The Vatican’s security force not needed on this occasion. Although maybe Newcastle would be better off if they had Vatican’s security force as their defensive unit.
Amongst the comings and goings, the electric elasticity of the match, that raucous crowd, the excitement in a thriller that kept upping the ante, Brentford probably had their worst-immediately-turned-best defining moment of the game when at 1-1 Isak had grabbed a hold of a launched ball and thrown makeshift left-back Lewis-Potter to the side. It became a sure-fire moment for Isak and Newcastle to go ahead and as Brentford’s aspirations were about to go up in flames. But after Isak milked it just little too much, having left not only Lewis-Potter for dead but also, wrongly, Mark Flekken, the Dutch keeper recomposed himself just enough, as Isak became too infatuated by the perfect shooting angle at goal, to palm it away from the Swede’s boots. The biggest turning point within this defensively decadent but relentlessly fun football game.
Brentford would never again feel the ring ropes so markedly against their backs. But it would not free from further eventual chaos. Pure Premier League fun!
Jacob Murphy would once again be allowed way too much room to roam on Brentford week’s side and Harvey Barnes would square it, the ball, in the goal mouth and spit it, the bad taste, out of his own mouth. Shortcomings in the functionality of Newcastle’s attacks but enough avenues opened by sub-par defensive output from a Brentford team that, if it has lost its touch anywhere, is precisely in its box defending, in its resoluteness to block and kick out danger in the most precarious spots. But today was just a day of having to go, of rolling with the punches; of keep swinging and try to outscore. All the more fun!
Until the cracks in the Magpie kingdom’s armor of defense were just too wretched. See, Newcastle didn’t have it to keep matching rhythm, intensity, the know how of the blow for blow. Like a deck of cards their defense this time would fold once again, early into the restart, fiddled by a set-piece as blunt and inoffensive as they come, launched by Flekken from Brentford’s own side of the pitch. How it all short-circuited is something Howe will have to figure out. But figure out is exactly what Nathan Collins of all people did to the day’s opponents, as they chased shadows. That of a lumbering not particularly technical or virtuous Irish centre-back. A missed aerial duel, a contemplative Pope, a ball dropped at the feet of a marauding Collins, and what is more fun than such anachronistic man beating Newcastle down to their knees. From where they would never quite balance themselves fully upright. And it was stark to see the differences as time wore on but the fundamental capabilities of both teams would be discerned through smoke and mirrors of the fanfare and the craziness of the end-to-end that this game was. What we saw was a team in Brentford that has grown through adversity and a Newcastle team that not only has not found strength in tough times but has regressed from where they were. Where Brentford are playing and winning these games despite having about 5 potential starters out injured, all the injuries last year seem to have functionally damaged Newcastle. Where one team has grown, the other has withered. One team has found order and the other has found chaos. Operability vs disfunction. Tactical cleverness to hide lacking talent vs an aimless swarm of ball-runners lacking all synchronicity.
Newcastle kept on being unable to shake the sense of a team that has too many players and also not enough of them. An opaqueness thicker with each passing minute. Muted notes that were at this point notes in an indistinguishable cluster. One that maybe had just enough noise to deafen the night and silence the crowd. But that moment simply never came. Eddie Howe and his eccentric assistant Jason Tindall being the only ones in harmony yelling and directing instructions but more and more giving off a feeling of having no answers nor solutions as Thomas Frank on the other bench kept up his “maniacal football coach” look, drawing shapes on tactical boards, pressing keys in talking to his staff and substitute players, arranging the closing stints that were imminently upon them, the final act to close out.
Newcastle threw everything in the mixer, yet the proverbial football “mixer”, the actual penalty box, remained aloof, a place they could access but only while being dazed and confused. A clear way to get in by just running at it but no collective clarity in how to figure out the intricacies of being in there. Where Brentford could do this whole game of back of forth, of ebbs and flows, survive even with such chaotic and often displaced defenders, allow adjusting players like Fabio Carvalho, Yegor Yarmoliuk or first-time-starter striker Igor Thiago enough room to roam, run and recite a little bit of nice football passages. Newcastle, on the other hand, had only an empty head of ideas. And the final shading color was that of Kevin Schade. The light was leaving, the curtains dropping, the rain falling and game ending, but there was still just that little bit of time left for just a little bit more fun. A sixth goal, a sense of joy. Newcastle coy, and boy… are Brentford fun. An enigmatic team to be discovered, still, because even with all the goals, being the second highest scoring team in the league, they’ve beaten all the bad and suspected-of-being-bad teams and yet… not that many of the good ones. They are terrible when playing away from home and unbeatable in front of their own crowd. An awkward dichotomy but one that just heightens the fun. Who cares about lackluster performances at Villa Park when in West London they put on such a thrilling show? And within a league that could have easily spat them out already, for as long as it may last, long live this awesome little team. They are real Premier League fun.