Just watched the Brentford highlights from this season to try and get an impression of what to expect from them.
A lot of teams play with a central striker with 2 wide forwards that can be counted as a 4-3-3 or a 4-5-1 but it appears Brentford play a straight 4-3-3 with the two wide men very high up. They appear to attack aggressively with all 3 midfielders rather than have a deep sitting anchor man which is offset by their full backs not really getting forward, it's quite unusual. So when they attack they will pen you in but they are going to be vunerable to a quick counter due to how aggressively their midfield push forward.
They don't really seem to have a physical presence up front but have a lot of pace, movement and create a lot of chances with lots of neat one-twos and through balls around the box. They are very fast on the counter attack especially with Watkins dribbling skills that James will need to be at his best to deal with. I think it will be a completely different test for the Dunkley and Kipre partnership as they wont have to face as many crosses and long balls (that they are very good at coping with) but they will have to be alert to cope with all the movement. The rest of the team will need to be good with their tracking the runners.
If we can press high up the pitch like we have in our best performances this season and force their defenders to panic into going long we'll have a lot of joy but they do seem quite comfortable at playing out from the back. But at the same time they do seem to have a mistake or two in them at the back when players have heavily pressured the defenders.
Overall Brentford play quite a similar style to us in a lot of ways but use a completely different system so on paper you'd think this could be quite end to end with a few goals in it.
While we've played supposedly bigger teams with more expensive players, i think Brentford are by far the best team we'll have faced this season I think they are dark horses for promotion via the play offs. I wouldn't bet against us judging on what we've shown this season but personally this is the least confident i've been heading into any game so far. I'd be very pleased with a point from this one. Will be interesting to see who is fit and what team we start with, this would be a good game to have Massey and Jacobs back for the defensive tracking.
