Under similar pressure, but in different forms – Bournemouth host Brentford

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It’s rare that a Championship playoff slate doesn’t whet your appetite, but when three out of the four sides involved have had patches in the season where they could have reasonably claimed to be the best side in the division, it becomes  even more intriguing.

Leaving the sensation that Barnsley have developed into this season, and an unconvincing yet sturdy Swansea to one side, two big hitters who many tipped to be up there at the start of the season will kick off 145 minutes before at the Vitality Stadium in Bournemouth vs Brentford.

It is a slightly paradoxical match up – both teams’ journeys to the playoffs have been starkly different, as have been their styles of play, yet they both come under strong pressure to make it to the Premier League promised land in different ways.

For the Bees, the pressure takes a less urgent form than their opponents, but it is strong nonetheless. To the common viewer, they’ll see how close Brentford came to the Premier League last season – a sensational second half to the season where the carrot of automatic promotion was dangled in front of them by a West Brom stumbling over the line, failing to take that chance, and then coming unstuck against an oddly cohesive and meticulously prepared Fulham in the playoff final. The fact that they’re West London rivals merely rubbed salt in the wounds, and obviously, after such a near miss last season, failing again would really knock the wind out the club’s sails. 

Yet the pain that needs to be avenged runs deeper. They’re the side with the worst playoff record in professional English football. Nine campaigns, zero successes – keep that one for a pub quiz. Wembley is also far from a happy stomping ground; a League One playoff final defeat to Yeovil in 2013, defeat to Carlisle in the 2011 Johnstone Paint Trophy final.

Of course this is the narrative part, and the demons the fans want to banish most going into the campaign, but as notoriously well run as Brentford are, they too have some financial problems which a place in the Premier League would go far in solving. Owner Matthew Benham’s personal finances have been hit particularly hard by the pandemic, given his personal fortune in sports gambling, exacerbated by a new stadium where fans have only been in attendance for a two week period.

As for Bournemouth, the pressure they face is due to short-term urgency. Unlike a perhaps ‘similarly sized-club’ on the South Coast in Brighton, financial security provided by Premier League money is even more essential to the Cherries. Without a flash new stadium with a 30,000 capacity, nor an elite academy set up and training ground to guarantee long-term security as Brighton have, Bournemouth’s current model of spending is totally dependent on regular Premier League funds.

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They’re in deep trouble if they don’t secure it soon; the squad already has been trimmed to its bare bones as it is- one glance at their bench for virtually any game this season shows a reliance on average academy players to make up the numbers. The longer they stay in the second tier, the more that trend is deepened, the more their individual quality in their squad disappears, the harder it becomes to get back to the Prem.

The game itself is a particularly hard one to predict, not least in the result but also the course of the game itself. Unless my research has failed me, Bournemouth are the first team to enter any EFL playoff campaign on the back of three straight defeats in the league. However, despite his disastrous tenure at Middlesbrough last season, Woodgate has shown solid tactical acumen to inject vigour, creativity and pace into the fairly sterile outfit that Cherries were under Jason Tindall.

Upon taking the Middlesbrough job, he stated his ambition to implement an expansive brand of football – perhaps it’s the case that with better players at his disposal, he now can. The final few performances of the season will be cause for concern, but Woodgate will hope this is just a natural tail-off in intensity after their playoff spot was secured. In late March to early April, with the reborn pair of Danjuma and Solanke fully firing, they could easily have claimed to be the best side in the league, as their 3-1 win over champions Norwich at Carrow Road showed.

With the role of home advantage difficult to judge in such times, it wouldn’t be disastrous for Bournemouth to not take a win with them to Kew Bridge, and given that Danjuma and Solanke can spring into life at any given moment, nor would it be a disaster for Bournemouth to be at an average level for most of the 180 minutes.

Having said that, one can rely on more consistency from Brentford. Thomas Frank deserves immense credit for overhauling Bees’ style of play in the 2020/21season, from a pacey, terrorising attack with goals coming from all manners, to ameaner style where getting balls into the box for Ivan Toney and wrenching evenmore goals from set pieces has worked wonders. Over the past month, Frank haschanged from a 4-3-3/4-2-3-1 to a lopsided 3-5-2, if it can even be pinned down as that. Even though Bees fans may want him patrolling the base of midfield, Christian Nørgaard has excelled dropping into a libero role in a three-man defence, where his simple yet incredibly effective distribution has become even more pronounced.

After playing in defensive midfield for the majority of the season, Janelt has enjoyed a role further forward with more freedom, and as a neutral it has been pleasing to see immensely talented poacher Marcus Forss receive more gametime in a front two, even if his relationship with Toney is still needs polishing.

It’s unlikely that either side will deviate from the formations used in the match between the sides only 3 weeks ago, which was wrongly seen as a dress rehearsal for a potential playoff match up. However, as his red card in the aforementioned game showed, Pontus Jansson does have a tendency for his eliteform to elude him in pressure games, which a hungry Solanke will be keen to exploit with his deep link up play and speed. This will be just one of many key individual battles across the pitch- a slightly cumbersome centre back pairing in Cook and Carter-Vickers for Bournemouth should find two foxes-in-the-box in Forss and Toney tough to deal with. Conversely, Brentford’s series of metronomic midfielders may find it difficult to deal with Lerma, Ben Pearson and Billing- to say they like to get ‘stuck in’ would be an understatement. The choice of full backs for either side will be pivotal- the difference between Kelly and Rico at left back for Bournemouth will surely alter the way Frank chooses to break lines.

Either way, it’s a semi final match up a far cry away from any of the ones from the 2019/20 season, where none of Cardiff, Swansea and Fulham had ever been exceptional at any point during the season. These are two sides who on their dayplay like a Premier League side. And with that at stake, let’s hope they indeed do.

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