Brentford are off to Wembley – The Warm-Up
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Updated 30/07/2020 at 08:03 GMT
A grand farewell to Griffin Park.
Brentford fans celebrate in the streets outside the stadium after the Sky Bet Championship Play Off Semi-final 2nd Leg match between Brentford and Swansea City at Griffin Park on July 29, 2020 in Brentford, England. Football Stadiums around Europe remain
Image credit: Getty Images
THURSDAY’S BIG STORIES
Whatever will Bee, will Bee
Lost the last two games of the regular season. Lost the first leg of the play-off semi-final. If you were thinking that Brentford’s wheels were coming off, well, the Warm-Up was right there with you. And don’t we look silly now.
Griffin Park couldn’t have asked for much more on its last night. A home win secured with three stylish goals. A comedy defensive error that ultimately didn’t mean anything. A touchline scrap. And a man of the match performance from Brentford’s stadium announcer, who refused to let the fact that the stadium was empty affect his performance.
Conventional wisdom suggests that the team that finishes third in the Championship has the trickier time of the play-offs, burdened as they are with the weight of disappointment at missing out on second. Judging by the way the Bees tore into the Swans here, they aren’t troubled by conventional wisdom in the slightest. Here’s Thomas Frank:
We talked about not leaving the pitch without getting to the final. The message was we needed to start faster than we ever started before. And we did that.
That first goal in particular will be giving Scott Parker and Neil Harris sleepless nights. There’s just five touches from the moment the ball leaves one goalkeeper’s hands, to the moment it skitters past the other’s futile dive; five touches that turned Swansea into a cloud of feathers. We don’t know if Brentford would thrive in the Premier League. But it looks like they’d be a lot of fun.
Haaland is sticking around
Fun fact: Erling Braut Haaland finished joint sixth in the race for the Bundesliga’s golden boot, with 13 goals. Not bad, for a player that gave the rest of the league half a season’s head start.
And the good news for Borussia Dortmund fans is that he’s told Bild he’s sticking around for the long haul.
I have a long-term contract here until 2024. In any case, it is my big goal to win BVB the title and to celebrate fantastic successes with our fans. […] We have to continue our development in the second half of the season and we want to be even more successful next year.
Now, the Warm-Up is torn here. We’d like to think that he means this: that he’s determined to topple Bayern’s dominance and bring some yellow and black variety back to the very top of the Bundesliga. We’d like to.
But appalling cynics that we are, we can’t help but see those words and read something more along the lines of: “Look, Real Madrid don’t have any money this summer, and Bayern aren’t replacing Lewandowski yet, and I can’t see anyone else going big on a big man up top, so. Might as well carry on.”
Maybe we’re wrong. More pertinently, maybe it doesn’t matter. Presumably Haaland waiting for a big move looks pretty similar to Haaland fulfilling his big goal and achieving fantastic success. He’s not going to get the former without taking a decent shot at the latter. So whatever he’s really thinking, there should be plenty more of this next season.
Barnsley will have their day in court
Down at the bottom of the Championship, the relegation battle has moved on from the pitch to the courts. Wigan’s appeal against their 12-point deduction will take place on Friday, and Barnsley — who stayed up thanks to the penalty — will be “allowed to make their views known”.
Those views being, presumably: Look, you’ve got rules haven’t you? Stand up for yourselves! Or whatever that is in Latin. We’re no lawyers.
To say Barnsley are a bit miffed by everything that’s gone on is an understatement. Shortly after their survival was confirmed (er, pending), they issued a statement putting the EFL on blast for “the blatant disregard for sporting/competitive integrity and the lack of governance in our division”. And they came with examples.
Clubs were charged with breaching rules surrounding Financial Fair Play and harming the EFL and its members. One ownership group, (which was approved by the EFL), failed in their duty to provide the requisite support to their respective Championship organisation. One other ownership group completed a takeover and provided funding to a Club without ever being approved by the EFL to become owners of that Club. Another competitor has yet to pay a transfer fee to Barnsley Football Club that was due in August of 2019. Several clubs have been delinquent in payment to contracted players.
They have a point, of course. Several points, righteous and just. But there’s a melancholy irony to it all. This mess of a league, riddled with all these problems, run by these negligent fools … and they’re off to proceedings to be allowed to stay in it. It’s a cursed game.
IN OTHER NEWS
What happens when the immovable object meets the other immovable object? Thanks to MLS, now we know.
RETRO CORNER
We would have been looking back at the 1966 World Cup final today, but yesterday’s Warm-Up went a day early. Curse you, Snowball. So instead, let’s look at the only World Cup final more controversial than England’s “goal? no goal?” epic: the final of the Jungle World Cup.
HAT TIP
Over on the Guardian, Ignacio Palacios-Huerta — academic, author, and former head of talent identification for Athletic Bilbao — explains why he reckons that the five-sub rule doesn’t necessarily benefit the bigger teams.
My starting point is this: if being able to use five substitutes favoured the big clubs, you would expect them to make more changes compared with smaller teams. However, since the season resumed that hasn’t been the case. After lockdown was relaxed in the Bundesliga, for instance, the top four teams used 4.03 substitutes per game, while the bottom four teams used 4.59 substitutes per game. In the Premier League, Manchester City and Chelsea used fewer substitutes on average than Bournemouth and Norwich. So what is going on?
COMING UP
Semi-final two, leg two: Fulham have a two-goal advantage over Cardiff City, in the struggle to take on Brentford for the glory, glamour, and giant bags of cash that come with the Premier League.
And Tom Adams will be here tomorrow to tell you about how that went.
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