Brentford have been getting a lot of headlines for their unique methods of late and last night they did it again.
Once again, the Championship is proving to be a far tighter race than the Premier League. With only seven points seperating the top seven, the battle for the automatic, and play-off, places is going to be fierce. This year, mixed in with those who have tried and failed at the top flight like Derby, Middlesbrough and Ipswich are Brentford.
The club has made a few waves of late, mainly for announcing that manager Mark Warburton will be leaving at the end of the season. Owned by former City trader Matthew Benham, they operate in a way dictated by stats and mathamatics and how Benham runs a club he owns in Denmark called FC Midtjylland made for a fascinating article by the Guardian’s Sean Ingle at the weekend.
Last night, Benham’s English club played lowly Blackpool at home and unsurprisingly they came away with a comfortable 4-0 win. But one stat underneath the result was out of this world; the shots taken.
Here, the via the BBC, are the details
In fairness, the possession stats ain’t too bad either, though Blackpool did have a man sent off just before half-time.
This breakdown of the time of the shots really hammers home the point
Brentford shots 2min 4 4 7 10 16 18 28 33 45 45 45 46 46 49 52 52 55 57 60 61 65 67 68 69 70 73 75 75 80 81 82 82 83 84 84 85 86 88 89 89 90
— Duncan Alexander (@oilysailor) February 24, 2015
We’d love to see Brentford in the Premier League, just to see how their model would work.
