The Great Form Flip

So Manchester City avoided yet another embarrassing collapse, Liverpool rebounded from their derby day disappointment to claw out a victory over Wolves, Everton held off Crystal Palace to become the Premier League’s form team, Chloe Kelly became happy again and AFC Wimbledon beat Salford City to move into the automatic play-off places in League 2, so what??

Something much more miraculous occurred in East London on Saturday, Brentford won their third away game in a row!!!

To put this into perspective it took until our visit to Goodison Park on 23rd November for us to pick up our first away point of the season and it wasn’t till our post Christmas trip to the Amex Stadium that we doubled our tally on the road.

Our home form stood in stark contrast to that abysmal away form, dropping just 2 points at our fortress before it was finally breached by Nottingham Forest on 21st December.

The first home loss of the season was the tipping point that initiated the great form flip, as we have failed to win at home since. This dreadful home form in 2025 can at least be mitigated by the hellish run of opponents we have been faced with, since Forest we have seen Arsenal, Manchester City, Liverpool and Spurs visit our heavenly patch of West London.

Facing the current top 4 in back to back home games was always going to be difficult, so maybe it’s no surprise that our only point in that run came from glorious comeback from 2-0 down in the final 10 minutes against the collapsing champions.

Losing to Spurs without laying a glove on them is just plain embarrassing, though perhaps not as humiliating as being dumped out of the FA Cup at home to a bunch of managerless Pilgrims that were pinned to the bottom of the Championship. A whole league separated us from the our Devon visitors, though having a front row seat for the game I couldn’t have told you that from the 90 minutes.

Our saving grace so far in 2025 has been our travelling prowess.
That draw at the Amex being followed 8 days later by a 5-0 demolition of the St. Mary’s saints, though few would have guessed that destroying a team on track to be the worst in Premier League history would signal a change of luck on our travels.

We followed up that masterclass by taking over South London with a 2-1 win at Selhurst Park, just having to hold on after they scored their consolation 5 minutes from time, despite 3 home games in the interim.

Our third away win in a row came this past weekend out in East London against the Hammers, who Shade shattered just 4 minutes after kick-off.

This third away win on the trot saw my beloved bees make it 4 away games unbeaten picking up 10 points along the way, having managed just a single point from our previous 9 such matches.

Our home form has gone in the opposite direction with just a single point secured from our last 5 games at the Gtech, having harvested a bumper 22 points form the previous 9.

Eighteen is how many home and away games respectively we get each season and this time it seems that someone has decided to play the ultimate prank on us by flipping our form on it’s head.

With relegation zone Leicester City our travel destination this Friday followed by the visit to the Gtech of the revived Everton team under David Moyes it seems that our great form flip is destined to continue through to at least March.

I expect the form to flip back at that point though as our travels take then take us to Bournemouth, Newcastle, Arsenal and Nottingham.

Enjoy the great form flip whilst it lasts, it may soon flip right back.