Were you there the last time West Ham beat Brentford in a league match?

This was how I began last week’s article prior to the game against Nottingham Forest:

“Once again Geoff hit the nail on the head with his article published on Thursday. Week after week we seem to be writing the same thing about the current state of the team, and the ongoing debate concerning the manager. The longer the winless run continues the further the pendulum will swing towards Moyes Out, especially with catastrophic performances like the one we witnessed last Sunday.”

For Sunday read Saturday but otherwise the same applies this week. We are slowly making our way down the Premier League for the second time this season. We began the campaign with ten points from four games and held second place in the table despite three of those four games being played away from home. The first slide began at that point with just one win and one draw in the next seven games seeing a descent into twelfth following the defeat at the hands of Monday’s opponents Brentford.

The revival began then with the next eleven league games producing six wins, four draws and just the solitary defeat (5-0 at Fulham). Somehow, despite some very average performances, we picked up 22 points from 11 games. Can you imagine us keeping that up for a whole season and finishing on 76 points from 38 games? No, nor can I. Of course there have been three defeats to follow that ‘eleven game run’.

At the turn of the year, after 19 games, at the halfway point in the season we sat in sixth. The three draws to begin 2024 meant that we stayed sixth but the teams below were catching up. Week by week we lost a place falling to seventh, eighth and currently ninth. As Geoff pointed out in his article by the time the Brentford game gets underway on Monday evening we will probably be tenth with Wolves likely to go past us (they are at home to Sheffield United on Sunday). If Chelsea had a league game rather than contesting the Carabao Cup Final against Liverpool on Sunday then we might have even been down in the bottom half once again as we were in early November.

Apart from Chelsea and Wolves we have a seven-point cushion above the team in twelfth, Fulham, so we are unlikely to fall any further in the near future. Our winless run since the start of 2024 in the league now stands at six games with three points from three draws in those games. Only one team in the Premier League has a worse record than that – Burnley have only collected two. Even bottom club Sheffield United have four!

The winless run in all competitions to begin the year 2024 has now reached eight after last week’s loss to Forest, equalling the winless record of Redknapp’s team at the beginning of 1997, and that of the team at the start of 1922, more than one hundred years ago. Failure to beat Brentford on Monday will create a new (unwanted) record of nine consecutive winless games.

Our current form doesn’t suggest that we can beat Brentford on Monday. Since they beat Forest 3-2 on 20^th January (as we did last November) they have had a tough run of fixtures, losing 3-2 at Tottenham, and also to Liverpool and Manchester City (twice), the last game a narrow 1-0 defeat on Tuesday this week. They did also beat Wolves so they have collected six points in 2024.

Our record against Brentford since they came into the Premier League in 2021 makes for depressing reading. We have faced them five times in league games, two at home and three away losing all five games 2-0, 2-1, 2-0, 2-0, and 3-2. We did beat them 1-0 on their ground in the third round of the FA Cup a little over a year ago. Five defeats, and they scored at least twice in all five games. In the reverse fixture at the Gtech Community Stadium in November we were 1-0 down, led 2-1 (Bowen and Kudus) before losing 3-2.

If we do lose the game then we will equal another record. In the whole history of the top-flight in English football apparently only three teams have a 100% record involving more matches against a single opponent – 6 games. They are Manchester City (v Bournemouth), Arsenal (v Reading), and Nottingham Forest (v Portsmouth). That would be another unwanted record heading our way in this poor run.

Losing our last three games 6-0, 3-0 and 2-0 means it is now over 300 minutes since we scored a league goal (the Ward-Prowse penalty v Bournemouth). We haven’t failed to score and lost the game in four consecutive league games since Alan Pardew was in charge when the run extended to five in September / October 2006. Less than two months later he was gone. In the six winless league games of 2024 we have scored only one goal in open play in 540 minutes (9 hours!) – Cornet’s goal v Sheffield United.

Are you depressed yet? I’ll continue to look for ways that we might possibly win this game. Perhaps the return of Paqueta? Is he fit yet? His wife said he was fit weeks ago. He has started 18 out of our 25 league games this season. All 10 of our wins have come in those games. In the 7 games he has missed we have failed to win any of them. Also we have scored an average of 1.7 goals per game in the games he has started, and 0.7 goals per game in the games he has missed. It seems we can only win when he plays. Surely he has to start even if he is not 100% fit yet?

Do you know when we last beat Brentford in a league game? How far back does your memory go? It was over 30 years ago. It was the very first season of the Premier League but we weren’t in it following relegation at the end of 1991/92. We were in the second tier (ridiculously called Division One at the time!). In April 1993 we beat them 4-0 at Upton Park with goals from Kevin Keen, Trevor Morley, Martin Allen and Peter Butler. I was there on that Saturday afternoon with 16,000 others for that game. Following the match we were third in the league pushing for promotion (only two went up automatically then). We still had three games to play.

The following Saturday (again only 16,000) we beat Bristol Rovers (Julian Dicks penalty and David Speedie). I remember great humour from the Bristol Rovers away fans that day who were singing “we’re going down in a minute” as the match was drawing to a close. They were applauded by the whole stadium. We were still third. A week later we played on the Sunday away at Swindon and won 3-1 (Clive Allen, Kenny Brown and Trevor Morley).

The final game of the season was at home to Cambridge. We needed to win to ensure automatic promotion. Over 27,000 of us were there that day (I should think so too!), a record attendance at Upton Park that season. I can remember the tension being unbearable as we failed to score in the first half and went in 0-0 at the break. Fortunately goals from David Speedie and Clive Allen sealed a 2-0 win and we were in the Premier League for the first time! We were level on 88 points with Portsmouth in second but our goal difference was 40 (81-41) and theirs was 34 (80-46). Great memories and great entertainment too!

To put current attendance levels into perspective the biggest league crowd at Upton Park in in our first season in the Premier League (1993-94) was the 28,832 of us who turned up for the visit of Manchester United. We hardly managed to exceed 21,000 for most games with that figure only exceeded three times with a low of just above 15,000. I mention the Manchester United game specifically as that was played on February 26^th1994, exactly thirty years to the day before the game against Brentford on Monday. We drew 2-2 that day (Lee Chapman and Trevor Morley). That season Manchester United finished as Champions and also we saw the end of terraces at Upton Park. We were all-seater for the beginning of the next season.