Keith’s Brentford Bonanza

Hello again, it’s been a while.

Whilst I was busy dealing with life crushing 2025 into 2026 like an avocado being made ready for toast there has at least been one escape from reality I have been able to rely on Brilliant Brentford.

At the beginning of the season most pundits were writing Brentford off as relegation favourites doomed to see our miracle finally end, almost doomed to be worse than Wolves if you can imagine that.

Who can blame them really? I’m certain that secretly many of my fellow season ticket holders at the Gtech were scared about the trajectory of our season after the summer the club endured.

Losing their first choice keeper, central defensive stalwart and midfield enforcer/captain would be enough to doom most teams, but that wasn’t all we lost in the summer of 2025 as both our top scorers, responsible for 40 goals combined last season, followed them out the door and that was just our losses on the field of play.

Behind the scenes the soul was ripped out too as the manager who got us into the Premier League for the first time, the great Thomas Frank, spread his wings across London and took almost his entire coaching team with him to Spurs.

My next blog will be about how that’s turning out for him… but in the meantime it left Bees with a shattered squad and a broken boot-room with few options to rebuild.

Many scoffed at Matthew Benham and the Board’s choice to replace Thomas and it was undeniably a left-field call.

Keith Andrews, a set-piece coach who had never had a head coach role in his career, was now being trusted to rebuild one of the smallest underdog teams in the league, with one of the smallest budgets.

That would be a mammoth task for anyone just to keep them in the league, yet after 25 matches we currently sit 7th in the table and only behind reigning league champions Liverpool on goals scored.

This is a Liverpool team whose outlay of £446mil in the summer was 4.8 times that of the Bees who were rebuilding a gutted side, with £320mil of that going on attacking players to boot…

Not only is that level of spending the stuff of fantasy for Brentford but such are the economics of surviving as an underdog in the top tier these days that the Mighty Bees had to rebuild the squad alongside making a £59.2mil profit over the summer.

Liverpool’s net spend was more than a quarter of a billion more than ours and yet we are on the same points tally and have actually won more games than them this season, 12 to their 11.

I’ll just let that one sink in….

Whilst the season started slowly, things have taken a violent upswing recently with 5 wins from our last 7 in all competitions topped off with back-to-back away wins against teams fighting for European glory.

First beating title-chasing Aston Villa on their own turf despite playing an entire half down to 10-men, a heroic display of defensive togetherness, before following it up with a brilliant comeback on Tyneside to secure the 3 points with the winner, in this best of 5 beauty, just 5 minutes before the final whistle.

Both of those results made history for the Bees, with victory over the Magpies being our fist on Tyneside since 1934 and completing the double over our illustrious opponents for the first time since that 1934/35 season. That is proved to be a lovely middle-finger at Yoane Wissa after he forced his way out in the summer to move north was just the delicious cream on top of this particular cake.

Our first ever win at Villa Park was also the third of a hat-trick of wins over The Villains this season, with a 4-3 victory on penalties in the League Cup 3rd round completing the trio.

All of these brilliant victories for Keith Andrews’ Buzzing Bees leave us just 5 points off the top 4 and shows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that no matter how bleak things look there is always hope for something miraculous to happen.

May Keith’s Brentford Bonanza continue for seasons to come!!!!