Brentford away of late – and how are Arsenal likely to fare?

Although Brentford’s away performance is not that wonderful overall, of late it has been rather impressive.

As you might recall Brentford lost to Arsenal at Griffin Park on New Year’s Day 1-3.  Then in their next home game, they lost to Plymouth Argyle of the Championship at home 0-1 in the FA Cup.  At that moment Plymouth were 24th, or to put it another way, bottom, of Championship, five points from safety.  Today after 41 games they are still bottom.

In this calendar year in the League, Brentford have however played six games of which they won the first five scoring 14 goals and conceding two.  Only in the most recent game on 2 April did they come unstuck with a 2-1 away defeat to Newcastle.

But the curious thing is those five away wins in succession (against Southampton, Palace, West Ham, Leicester and Bournemouth) were their only five away wins of the season; and all were against what we might call clubs of a lesser fortune.  In the most recent away game (against Newcastle on 2 April) the run came to an end 2-1.

So how do we explain a team that had won no away games in the first half of the season suddenly going on a run and winning five in a row, conceding only two goals while knocking in 14?

Certainly, the answer primarily is revealed in terms of who those games were against.  Southampton have won one home game this season, Leicester have won two, Palace and West Ham have won five each and Bournemouth six.  And that is in each case out of 15 or 16 games.

In short, in a season which we have so often noted has been a campaign in which clubs have had curiously odd fixture lists, Brentford had a fixture list in which for a time, when they played away from home they found themselves playing teams for whom scoring a goal was a superhuman achievement.  But then when finally after all the soft touches were over they came up against Newcastle away, Brentford dutifully lost.  In their last five games, home and away, they have won one game, lost two and drawn two.  The victory came against a rapidly declining Bournemouth side.

But to be fair this is an improvement on last season, when they finished 16th in the league, although they were never in danger of going down, missing relegation in the final table by 15 points.

And this seems to be the new pattern at the foot of the Premier League, with the bottom three clubs being cast seriously adrift.   At the moment the gap between Wolverhampton Wanderers, the perennial 17th club and Ipswich Town in 18th is a whacking great 12 points, with Ipswich having a goal difference 18 goals worse than Wolverhampton.

The clubs have played each other 21 times across the centuries and in the 1930s as Arsenal started to fade Brentford did improve and picked up some wins.  But as you would expect Arsenal are still out in front with 10 victories to Brentford’s six.  Five games have been drawn.

Indeed since May 1939 there have been 12 games between the two clubs and Brentford have won just one of them – a 2-0 victory in the Premier League in 2021 at Griffin Park.   They have also secured two draws – one in 1946 and one in 2003.   Otherwise, it has been Arsenal all the way, although rarely by many goals.

In fact since 1902 neither club has managed more than three goals between, and only four games have seen a side score three – once by Brentford in 1938 and the rest by Arsenal.

Brentford have however scored five goals twice this season.  Once in a 5-3 league win against Wolverhampton and once in a 0-5 away league win against Southampton.

Arsenal have scored five goals in five matches this season  – three times in the league, once in the league cup, once in the Champions League. 

But then we also scored seven in the Champions League on one occasion as I recall.