Bees fan's 'mixed emotions'

Last updated : 13 May 2005 By Andy Parsons

Ben believes that Wednesday played well as a whole but can take positives from his own team’s performance. Although Ben believes that the racial incident involving Isaiah Rankin was his lowlight of the evening, he is confident that Martin Allen’s men will do well at Griffin Park.

 

On the Rankin incident, Wednesday have started off proceedings to try to name and shame the small minority who were making monkey gestures at the Brentford forward. Granted, the former Barnsley striker got away with a terrible tackle which should have been a red card offence but to bring a player’s skin colour into it is an absolute disgrace - hopefully this is never an issue again involving our club.

 

Back to football though, let’s have the Brentford view on what happened last night at Hillsborough.

 

1 What was your verdict of the game at Hillsborough?

Disappointed but pleased at the same time, terribly mixed emotions really, we didn’t play well at all and didn’t really possess any kind of threat which disappointing but then again its only 1-0 and we luckily still have Rankin or we'd be even worse in attack he was might lucky to stay on!

2 What were the highlights and the lowlights of the game on Thursday?
Not much went our way in the game but I'd say that the team played better in the second half, we finally looked like a team and put some passes together, what most impressed me was the atmosphere, Hillsborough - hasn’t been that loud since you were doing well in the Premiership, as far as lowlights go, our defensive outlook wasn’t exactly what us as fans wanted to see but I’m sure MA knows what he's doing, the trouble with Rankin soured the game as well.


3 Which Wednesday and Brentford players impressed you?
The whole Wednesday unit impressed me really showed what you can do, your goalkeeper Lucas looked very in control at the back to say he'd just come back from injury, no bees really shone except Tabb when he came on in the 2nd half he was the only one with any positive movement and looked lively.


4 What sort of atmosphere will we expect in the second leg?
Hopefully Griffin Park will be rockin! We've had some ticketing problems again, being a small club we can’t buy tickets over the phone or on the net so it depends how many can get down to the stadium, MA reckons the ground will be full but it'll probably be just short of a sell out. Nothing compared to your place but our ground is old fashioned and I’m sure with the fans packed tightly in we can create quite an arena to play in.


5 You guys are not too hot in the play-offs - feeling confident this time around?
Let's be honest! We're rubbish when it comes to playoffs and this is 5th time lucky if we go up! I'm still fairly confident 1-0 isn’t the end of the world we just need to up our performance - an early goal and we're right back to square one again, thing is we don’t score early goals we just concede them! It's going to be an uphill battle; the boys never make things easy!


6 What's Brentford's game plan in the second leg?
Attacking hopefully! We just need to not panic if a goal doesn’t come then we need to keep pressing, we really need players running at your defence because we didn’t test you at all last night, get some shots in and just generally be an attacking threat.

 

Many thanks to Ben Small, editor of www.brentford-mad.co.uk for his help in this piece, my views on the whole affair will be on his site shortly.