Survival secured: Why Brentford face a crucial summer

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With another season in the Championship all but guaranteed following long awaited wins away to Nottingham Forest and at home to Bolton, Brentford, and new manager Dean Smith in particular, can breathe a temporary sigh of relief and start planning for the future rather than sweating over the immediate prospects of the team’s abject recent form.

Given that the 2016-2017 Championship seems likely to be another strong one littered with under-performing big clubs – possibly including all of three of Aston Villa, Newcastle and Sunderland – it is essential that Brentford move on quickly from a mostly disappointing second season in the second tier if they are to avoid a long struggle at the bottom next year.

It is fair to say that the Bees have been helped out by the poor form of the Championship’s crisis clubs this season. Prior to the Forest win, Brentford had taken just three points from their previous eight league games, including losses to strugglers Charlton and Rotherham. Having overcome the unsettling start to the season that saw head coach Marinus Dijkhuizen leaving after only nine games in charge, Brentford started 2016 disastrously.

Since taking over from caretaker manager Lee Carsley on 30 November 2015, Smith’s record reads W7, D3, L12, with a win percentage of just 25% in 2016. This is close to relegation form and were it not for the desperate points tallies of Bolton, Charlton and MK Dons, Brentford would be in greater danger of relegation and the added strain that brings. Moreover, Smith has started to receive strong criticism from fans for the poor performances in recent defeats to Blackburn, Charlton and local rivals QPR. The winning start to April has done a lot to remove the immediate pressure, but Smith must be itching for the season to end so that he can focus on the job of recruiting for next season and working with his team over the close season ahead of a fresh start in August.

While it is never satisfactory to blame a poor run of form on injuries and transfer policy alone, there was more to the Bees’ poor run of results in recent months than simply under-performing players or manager. A club of Brentford’s size is always vulnerable to losing its best players to bigger sides with higher wage offers and so it proved with the departures of Andre Gray, Toumani Diagouraga and James Tarkowski to Championship rivals Leeds and Burnley respectively over the course of the season, while star winger Jota returned to Spain due to personal reasons.

Although the club managed to keep hold of their best player in Alan Judge despite interest from bigger teams including Burnley, the impact of losing a core of their first-choice players was always likely to be damaging. Added to the ongoing injuries to highly-rated striker Scott Hogan (who has missed nearly two seasons following a cruciate knee ligament injury weeks after signing from Rochdale in 2014) and club record signing Danish international defender Andreas Bjellend (who turned his knee on a terrible pitch in the second game of the season in a Capital One Cup defeat to Oxford), Smith has been forced to make do since taking over.

Smith’s struggles with a limited squad has been recognized by owner Matthew Benham, who recently made clear his confidence in the manager in an interview with fanzine Beesotted. Backing Smith to overcome the difficulties and take the club forward, Benham acknowledged that Brentford’s squad needed some additions, but that it would have been unwise to pay inflated prices for players nearing the end of their contracts in the January window, particularly as the club needed to be mindful of staying within the bounds of FFP. Given that the Bees are likely to end up with a mid-table finish, and would realistically have struggled to sustain a play-off push even with retaining Tarkowski and Diagouraga, this strategy was clearly the right one.

The final few games of the season provide Smith with a good opportunity to really assess his current squad without having to fret over the league table. The recent performances of Nico Yennaris in defensive midfield will give cause for optimism, as the player has improved greatly during a difficult season for the team as a whole, following a successful spell on loan at Wycombe last season. Yennaris has also scored in consecutive matches against Forest and Bolton, opening his account for the Bees and promising to contribute in an area where the team have struggled this season. One hole that will no doubt need to be filled come July will be that of attacking midfielder Judge, who looks certain to move on to a bigger club following a second successful season in the Championship and breaking into the Republic of Ireland squad ahead of Euro 2016.

A stress-free end to the season is something of a rarity for Bees fans in recent years, following the trauma of 2012-2013’s dramatic final day failure to secure automatic promotion and play-off final defeat, promotion a year later and an unexpected play-off appearance last season. While the terrible form of the first quarter of 2016 means that most fans will settle for a more relaxed end of season this year, it is vital that summer squad development is more successful than last time around so as to avoid a slow start and prolonged battle at the wrong end of the table.

Written by Alan Housden.

Featured image: All rights reserved by Laura.