I can’t remember the first time I went to Griffin Park. Or why I did. Brentford crept into my life as imperceptibly as it took it over. Or was it me creeping into the life of a club founded in 1889? Either way, for a twelve-year-old, middle-class kid keen to find an “edge”, Brentford wasn’t an obvious place to look.
London is rich in footballing history, style and prowess. More strategically minded friends were beginning to discover the wonders of Arsenal, Chelsea and Tottenham. But I hadn’t yet fallen for football. So perhaps it was naivety that led me to choose a harder path, not for the first or last time in my life.
After decades of bottom-feeding in the lower rungs of English professional football, all Brentford had going for it was a pub on each corner of the ground — not much use for someone of my age and stature who was several years away from discovering the benefits of fake ID. But, somehow, I started going to watch the Bees in the 1994–1995 season, which would come to epitomise everything I love and hate about the club.
The first game that I can clearly recall was a 7–0 defeat of Plymouth Argyle. Our top strikers, the languidly effective Robert Taylor and sleek Nicky Forster, both scored that December day. These figures, along with hard-nut left-back Martin Grainger and marauding midfielder Paul Smith, loomed so large in my young imagination that they remain there to this day. I was lucky to begin my entanglement with Brentford in such good form. After just a few games, I was hooked.
From my perch near the front of the small terrace in the Braemar Road Stand, I was so close to the action that I felt part of it. I could smell the mud that wingers kicked up when they ran down the touchline. I could hear the crunch of sliding tackles that would merit an instant red card today but barely caught the referee’s eye back then. And I was surrounded by men, for it was mostly men, singing, shouting and swearing along with the beat of the game.
I stood just in front of one man who spent most of the 90 minutes screeching “Push up Brentford” — a legend who inspired a recent documentary about our long-suffering fans. Another near neighbour had a penchant for saltier utterances and an inexplicable disliking for Paul Smith, who he once chastised with the unforgettable line: “Smith: professional footballer? More like a professional cunt”.
This was my immersion to the Brentford family — several thousand disparate people from an unfashionable part of West London united by love of an unfashionable club. Brentford is such a laughably dull place that the BBC commissioned a mockumentary about a gang of hapless, wannabe, Brentford-based DJs and MCs called People Just Do Nothing. The protagonists are, of course, Brentford fans, in the show and in real life.
As with every other family, being part of Brentford meant that tragedy was always just around the corner. Although we seemed to be on course to win the league in my first season, and secure promotion to the second tier of English football, we fell short in the last few games. Finishing second, we would normally have been promoted. But, due to an ill-timed restructuring of the league pyramid, we had to make do instead with the Play-offs. We lost the Play-off semi-final in a penalty shootout, the first of many such near misses to come. I was heartbroken.
Twenty-seven years later, I’m still not sure exactly why I love Brentford. I’ve always found it hard to put love into words. Maybe it’s because what makes that feeling so all-encompassing is its elusive nature. Or maybe it’s just because I’m not very romantic.
Like dogs, there’s something instinctive about our love for chasing a spherical object across a patch of grass. But Fido is not so taken by watching a bunch of other mongrels fight it out for possession of the ball.
Fans of Barcelona or Arsenal, like my more discerning brothers, might be true connoisseurs of the beautiful game. Until very recently, at least, that is not an accusation you could throw at Brentford fans. We weren’t just shit for years. We were bad at football for decades, with the odd good season and occasional twinkle-toed player to lighten the pain. However, as I found out in my first season at Griffin Park, the brief moments of hope were almost invariably precursors to crushing disappointment.
For a small, poor club like Brentford, falling just short of promotion did not mean we could start again next season from a position of strength. It meant all our best players leaving for better wages at better teams, managers and owners walking out the door, and another multi-year cycle of drudgery, before a new dawn of faith and the darkness of failure again. “It’s Brentford Innit?”, as fans have lamented into their pints for decades.
Maybe I loved Brentford because it was mine. The child and grandchild of refugees, I wanted to belong to somewhere and something that wasn’t keen to kick me out. Brentford couldn’t afford to be picky about its fans — although I sadly met a few racists over the years who didn’t agree.
Walking the two-and-a-half miles from my mum’s house in Ealing to Griffin Park, or taking the 65 bus, was a journey from one family to another. My heart would beat a little faster at the first person I saw wearing a red-and-white-striped shirt. As the floodlights appeared above the elevated M4 motorway, my pace would quicken, the beacons drawing me in. As I joined the hubbub of supporters in the narrow streets of terraced houses that backed onto the stadium, I would always feel like I was coming home again. At one with my fellow underdogs.
While top football teams have become globalised brands, you couldn’t say that of Brentford. At least it is not the sort of brand that many sane people would pay to associate with. Brentford is more of an immersive sentient experience.
For you don’t just watch Brentford. You smell it. The wafts of beer and cigarette smoke as you pass the pubs. The aroma of ageing metal and oil as you squeeze through the tiny turnstiles at Griffin Park. The heady scent of steaming pies and burgers filled with indeterminate meat.
And you hear Brentford. The jokes, the insults, the songs. The roar of a goal celebration reverberating off the tinny Griffin Park stands. The rapid-fire applause after a desperate, lunging save by the goalkeeper. And the horror, on my part, at the occasional (but not rare enough) racist abuse or chant.
It’s not pretty. But it’s Brentford. Life at its best and worst.
I’ve lived most of my adult life overseas, working as a journalist and foreign policy analyst in Singapore, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and now Australia. Brentford has always made this citizen of nowhere feel like he has a somewhere too.
As Pascal Mercier writes in Night Train to Lisbon: “We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place; we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there.”
That’s why, every year before the pandemic, I would travel thousands of miles back home to find that part of me that only exists in that little stadium in West London
But this love affair is about much more than identity.
Brentford has given me another life. We all live several lives, and I’m not talking about reincarnation. We have our family life, our life with friends, our professional life, the life of our co-religionists, tiddlywinks team or allotment buddies. These lives extend in circles around us, some flowing out concentrically like ripples from a pebble dropped in a pond, others overlapping like Venn diagrams. Each life has its own pace and rhythm, its own peaks and troughs, merging and colliding to make us the strange, unique beings that we are.
I was never much into gods, gardening or tiddlywinks. But, thankfully, I found Brentford.
We live our lives through stories. And I love stories. I’ve spent my life listening to them, reading them and writing them. Brentford has bequeathed me more epic tales than Homer’s Odyssey or Aesop’s Fables. Victory against the odds, defeat against the odds, rising stars, fallen stars, self-sacrifice, self-destruction, greed, jealousy, revenge, exhilaration, exhaustion and perseverance. Heroes like Nicky Forster, Lloyd Owusu and Martin Allen. Villains like David Webb, Ian Holloway and QPR (sorry Tony). We’ve suffered unscrupulous owners, ungrateful players and, putting it politely, unwelcoming away fans. We’ve relished the goals, the crunching tackles and the infrequent, until recently, flashes of exquisite footballing beauty.
In 90 minutes you can go through so many moments of clashing emotion, from the high planes of elation to the Slough of Despond (Slough being just down the road from Brentford and considered equally unfit for humans by the chattering classes). Watching Brentford can be like throwing yourself into an evangelical church sermon, then nipping out for a quick funeral, before returning for the ecstatic laying on of hands, followed by another series of devastating psychological blows.
Sometimes in my younger days — and, if I’m honest, still today — I can’t sleep after a match, reliving in my mind how our striker missed that open goal, or why our defender thought it was a good idea to slide in for that challenge on a yellow card.
Other times, the games are so dull that they are not even forgettable. There’s simply nothing to remember them by.
Beyond the football, there are the people. All sorts of people. Friends and family, of course, many of whom have drifted in and out of love with Brentford, as the club’s fortunes rose and fell, and as their lives transformed too. Jobs, marriage, children, death.
Girlfriends, and then a wife, who had to be given “the talk” about the importance of Brentford and the inadvisability of asking me to choose between some earthly social engagement (like an anniversary) and matchday at Griffin Park (or on a screen somewhere around the world).
Then there’s the penumbra of supporting characters that make Brentford what it is. Push Up, who I mentioned earlier. The elderly man who used to eat an apple at every match and methodically affix the Gala or Granny Smith sticker on the back of the seat in front, a tally of suffering in most seasons. Or the irrepressible super-fan known as Harry Potter. I remember one relegation season when he tried the patience of supporters by repeating the Panglossian line “Don’t worry, there’s always next season” all the way home on an interminable coach trip back from defeat in a grim northern town.
Given that I’m writing about football I should talk about goals — and near misses. There are some that are seared into my memory, alongside the other snatches of unencumbered joy and unmitigated pain that maintain an enduring hold on my limited cerebral capacity.
Substitute Alex Rhodes scoring his first goal for Brentford against Bournemouth in 2004 to save us from a relegation that had looked certain earlier in the season.
DJ Campbell’s late FA Cup winner against Premier League Sunderland, flicking the ball around the defender with his right foot before slamming it into the corner of the goal with his left, sending Griffin Park wild.
Marcello Trotta missing a stoppage-time penalty against Doncaster Rovers in 2013 that would have seen us promoted to the second tier, instead of condemning us to another inevitable Play-off defeat.
And, I’m glad to say, Emiliano Marcondes putting us 2–0 up against Swansea City in the Championship Play-off final at Wembley Stadium in May, after a pitch-length counter-attack. That was the first time Brentford have won the Play-offs, after ten attempts, a feat that defies the simple victory odds of one in four (as our owner, a professional gambler and lifelong fan, would well know).
To the outside world, this was about little old Brentford winning the so-called richest game in football, with promotion to the Premier League worth £180 million in the first season alone. To me it was about much more, not least final vindication for the Playoff defeat I witnessed in my first season as a Brentford fan.
The feeling of promotion to the Premier League, where we will play every week against the likes of Manchester City, Liverpool and Arsenal, will be impossible to beat or repeat. Especially as it came in the midst of such a miserable time for us all. This will be the first time we have played in the top flight of English football for 74 years, and only a literal handful of Brentford fans still remember those games from the 1940s.
Having lost last year’s Play-off final to rivals Fulham, and endured so many earlier disappointments, I tried to watch this match without hope. Following Brentford has taught me that it is always the hope that kills you.
But, sitting by a wood fire in a cottage in rural South Australia in the middle of a bitterly cold night, as I screamed at the TV, whooped and banged my fists on the sofa, I struggled to keep the hope at bay. 2–0 up within 20 minutes, and with a Swansea player sent off on 65 minutes, it really looked it is was our day, our time. Yet even in the 93rd minute, when any sensible bookmaker would long ago have stopped taking bets, I kept repeating to myself the twisted mantra of the Brentford fan: how are we going to fuck this up again?
Brentford has given me so much.
It has taken me across my country to places I never would have otherwise been. West Bromwich, Bournemouth, Luton, Nottingham, Bristol, Wycombe, Sheffield, Peterborough, Ipswich, Gillingham, Milton Keynes, Carlisle, Stevenage, Walsall, Colchester, Stockport, Grimsby, Southend, Chesterfield, Farnborough and Hinckley, to name a few.
Along the way, I have met all kinds of people, had some crazy times, and just a few unpleasant experiences. I’ve been soaked through, frozen stiff and bored senseless, sometimes simultaneously.
But times are changing. I’ve had a season ticket in every stand at Griffin Park, where Brentford first played in 1904. That creaking hulk of steel and memories is currently being demolished, to be replaced by over-priced housing, and we’ve moved to a new stadium fit for our rising stature.
Brentford has taught me some invaluable lessons: the power of endurance, the need to embrace uncertainty and the beauty and bitterness of believing.
Some of my best moments at Brentford have been defeats. I can still feel a chill down my spine when I recall nearly 10,000 fans singing in unison as we lost a Play-off semi-final to Sheffield Wednesday in 2005. We had no chance of victory by the second half of that game but we were happy just to be Brentford, and to be together.
Brentford binds me to people in my life who I’ve lost, moments and feelings that I will never forget. It’s not so much that football is more important than life or death, as Liverpool manager Bill Shankly said. It’s that it transcends it. At once totally ephemeral and yet totally absorbing.
Living overseas for the last thirteen years, when I told people I’m from London, many asked me if I liked football and which team I supported. If I was feeling chatty, and had the energy to explain in Indonesian, Vietnamese or English, I would tell them about Brentford and the delights of football in the second or third tier. Sometimes, to my eternal shame, I’d just say Arsenal to end the conversation.
Now when people ask which team I support, I won’t need a long preamble, at least for this season in the Premier League. If we managed to survive and thrive in the big time, part of me worries that we won’t be “Brentford Innit” any more. But the greater part of me just can’t wait for the season to get started.
Up first on Friday night (or 5am on Saturday as it’s known in Sydney), my brothers’ Arsenal. Fittingly, they are the last team we played in the top flight before our relegation in 1947. It feels like a circle is closing, for Brentford and for me. After nearly 30 years stumbling through the football wilderness, maybe I’ve finally found my edge. But, don’t worry, I’ll be keeping my hope on a tight leash.
