EFL Championship Play-Off Final Preview: Brentford v Fulham
- Ben Wignall
- Aug 3, 2020
- 4 min read
The Football League play-offs sometimes throw up a bit of a curveball, and none more-so than this year when Wycombe Wanderers secured a place in the Championship next season - despite being eighth in the table before 'Points Per Game' happened.
Several League One teams felt hard done by because of how the season finished, but in the Championship there were no such hard luck stories this year.
Much is said about the 'fairness' of the play-off system, which sometimes does not reward the best team over the course of a league season.
In 2005, West Ham United - who had failed in the play-off final in Cardiff a year before - finished a whole 12 points behind third-placed Ipswich Town, but the Hammers dispatched of the Tractor Boys over two legs, then defeated Preston North End 1-0 in the final to return to the Premier League.
The team that has taken up the final play-off spot have succeeded on several occasions, but this year we saw true class rise to the occasion in the form of London rivals Brentford and Fulham.
They were both in contention for automatic promotion on the final day, but neither team could take advantage of West Bromwich Albion slipping up at home to Queens Park Rangers, leaving the Bees and the Cottagers both on 81 points, way ahead of the chasing pack.
The battle for the other two play-off spots went down to the final day, and we saw a catastrophic collapse from Nottingham Forest, which gave Swansea City an unlikely route into a two-legged affair with Brentford, whilst Cardiff's solid season-ending form meant they'd collide with Scott Parker's outfit.
As ever, the Championship gave us pure entertainment from start to finish, and it wasn't without controversy either.
Fulham and Cardiff's two games passed without incident, but the Cottagers only just got past their Welsh counterparts despite leading 2-0 from the first leg.
The Bluebirds won the second leg at Craven Cottage 2-1, but it wasn't enough to see them into the final - their biggest rivals though were embroiled in much controversy at the Liberty Stadium.
Swansea did indeed come out on top in the first leg, but the match was overshadowed by a ridiculous red card shown to Brentford's Rico Henry, which was rightly overturned on appeal.
Brentford needed a quick start in their final ever game at Griffin Park, and they did just that by bagging twice in the first 15 minutes on their way to a 3-1 win on the night.
This all means that all eyes in west London and beyond will be glued to the action that unfolds at Wembley, where we will see two teams who play football the 'right way' battling it out for a place in the Premier League in one of the richest one-off games in football today - as Henry Winter details below.
Fulham have been there and done it all before at the top level. Their latest stint mixing it with the English football elite only lasted one season, but they had the ammunition this season to go straight back up.
Scott Parker has been given time in his first senior managerial job, but there have been times in the season where Fulham fans have been frustrated with him, such as their three-game losing streak in December.
Expectations were high though, and when you have a multi-million pound front-line which includes Anthony Knockaert, Bobby Decordova-Reid and Ivan Cavaleiro, automatic promotion should be the aim.
And that's not even mentioning Aleksandar Mitrovic, a man who has goals embedded in his DNA and has bagged 26 this season - but Fulham proved they're not necessarily a one-man team in their two-legged affair against Cardiff as the big Serbian was rested because of a hamstring issue.
Parker likes his team to play it out from the back, with Harrison Reid sitting in-front of the two centre backs, and like many teams now Fulham have two wing backs overlapping outside their inside forwards in Joe Bryan and Cyrus Christie.
Brentford play the exact same way under their Danish manager Thomas Frank, but unlike Fulham's front three, who have very much relied on Mitrovic to get the goals this season, the Bees have seen huge contributions from their 'BMW' in the final third.
That acronym stands for 'Benrahma, Mbeumo, Watkins', the trio that have set the Championship alight this season with their goalscoring and chance-creating - just watch below to see them at their very best.
Watkins has led the way with 25 goals in his first season as a central striker, whilst club record signing Mbeumo bagged 15 league goals and notched eight assists.
But the standout player has got to be the enigmatic Algerian Benrahma, whose skill and product has got scouts and football fans raving - his league output has seen him hit 17 goals and eight assists.
If Brentford don't win the play-off final, you'd expect the front three to be dismantled as the current Premier League vultures - and perhaps foreign teams too - will be circling, but their class stretches all throughout the team.
Their centre-back partnership of Pontus Jansson and Ethan Pinnock has been solid all season, and like Fulham, they have a man sitting in-front of them in Christian Norgaard, a summer purchase from Fiorentina who is the glue in the Bees' midfield.
Fulham do have one man besides Mitrovic though who on his day can be a match-winner - as he showed in the play-off final two years ago.
Tom Cairney was the difference in 2018 against Aston Villa, and even though he's not had his greatest season on paper, with just eight goals and three assists to his name, the Scotland international is no doubt a Premier League player when he's fit and firing.
Even though this is a one-off game where anything can happen, it's interesting to note that in the two previous encounters this season, Brentford did the double over their rivals without conceding a goal.
A first half Mbeumo goal gave the Bees a 1-0 win at home back in December, and in the return fixture at Craven Cottage in June, goals in the 88th and 91st minute secured the seasonal double for Brentford.
As mentioned previously though, form and past results go out of the window once the two teams step out onto the famous Wembley turf.
One team are gunning to be in the Premier League for the first time, whilst the opposition are looking to get back to where they feel they belong after a year away - and it should be an incredibly fascinating encounter.
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