Three Premier League games. Three consecutive matches with a Brentford goal within the first 60 seconds.
Manchester City: Wissa, 1 min.
Tottenham Hotspur: Mbeumo, 1 min.
West Ham United: Mbeumo, 1 min.
If you want a fast start, you better get a ticket for the Gtech Community Stadium (with apologies to Tracy Chapman).
Just one Premier League team has scored three first-minute goals over the course of an entire season before — Everton in 1998-99. Brentford have achieved the feat in successive fixtures — against two ‘Big Six’ sides and another who surely knew what was coming.
The first team in @premierleague history to score in the first minute in three consecutive games
Brentford Football Club ⚡️
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) September 28, 2024
After Saturday’s events, it is easy to feel for Julen Lopetegui, already feeling pressure from West Ham fans after just one win to begin the season.
“Keep it tight,” he might have said pre-match. “No frills. Stay tight, win the second balls.”
Thirty-seven seconds later, Bryan Mbeumo had the ball in the West Ham net.
“We have to be embarrassed,” midfielder Tomas Soucek told Premier League Productions. “We saw how they scored those two goals (in their last two games) and they did it against us. We all prepared very well for it and we still conceded.”
“We showed (their record) to the players and it’s incredible we suffered,” Lopetegui added to the BBC. “It’s a bad picture to (have) conceded so early.”
Regrets. But the key thing to bear in mind is this: Brentford treat a kick-off like any other set piece, an opportunity to exploit a dead-ball scenario.
“It’s one of the more difficult to score from, but we see it as a set-play situation we can set up and control as much as possible,” head coach Thomas Frank said after the Spurs game.
⚡ Lightning starts
The fastest back-to-back opening goals in @premierleague history 🐝 pic.twitter.com/2bzYV0eOPi
— Brentford FC (@BrentfordFC) September 23, 2024
“It’s Keith Andrews who is the man behind it,” the head coach added a week later in his pre-match press conference. “He deserves all the credit.”
Andrews, a 44-year-old former Republic of Ireland international, joined Brentford as their set-piece coach in July.
The west London club were the first team in English football to have such a role — initially filled by Gianni Vio in 2015 — and subsequent incumbents include Nicolas Jover (now at Arsenal), Andreas Georgson (now at Manchester United), and Bernardo Cueva (now at Chelsea).
Cueva, in particular, has given Andrews big shoes to fill — the Mexican joined in 2020, helped Brentford get promoted, and made them into the Premier League’s best set-piece side before being headhunted by Chelsea this summer.
But scoring three first-minute goals is some way for his replacement to begin the new job.
This is how they did it on Saturday…
From the kick-off, Fabio Carvalho passes the ball to Nathan Collins, who takes a touch before playing it to Ethan Pinnock on his left.
Pinnock then plays a long diagonal ball towards the edge of the box.
This is slightly different to the two previous weeks — where goalkeeper Mark Flekken received the ball straight from kick-off.
The principle, however, is the same.
“First and foremost, it is not a coincidence,” said Frank, speaking to Vavel. “It’s not like we just roll it back and kick it forward; we maybe roll it back and maybe kick it forward, or maybe we do something, but there’s clear roles for everyone involved.”
Those roles are his players’ positioning when winning second balls. After the long ball, Brentford’s players fan out rather than chasing it directly — think of it almost like a kind of zonal attacking.
Here, West Ham are so concerned with winning the long ball that they have dropped seven defenders back to Brentford’s five — but it’s a trap. The secret is winning the subsequent ball — and West Ham’s defensive setup means Brentford will invariably have more players in the middle third.
Maximilian Kilman heads the ball forward, and Sepp van den Berg does well to regain it under pressure, passing it backwards to Collins. Against City and Tottenham, Brentford win the ball back even closer to the opposition goal, and they attack and score via crosses straight away. Saturday was more complex.
West Ham have pushed out after Kilman’s header, but Brentford still have four players forward, who have each found pockets of space.
Collins’ ball through the lines to Kevin Schade is excellent, and the German turns Emerson Palmieri and drives to the byline.
It is a direct approach. “We had a plan again, it’s a mindset of playing forward and trying to get on the game straight away,” Frank explained on Match of the Day.
Essentially, Brentford’s starts can be distilled to three principles: play forward, play quickly, position yourself for second balls.
Schade plays the ball into the box and, though Alphonse Areola bats it away, Carvalho is in position to gather. Kristoffer Ajer comes up in support and can cross with no pressure on the ball.
It ends up back with Schade, who dinks a cross back in. This is the third time after just 30 seconds that Brentford have played a ball into the box — creating opportunities at that intensity will lead to something.
Ajer’s decision to play the ball to Schade is clever because the width stretches West Ham’s defence, who have chased the ball from the byline to Carvalho and back to Schade within seconds. It is the perfect conditions for players to find space in the box — a specialty of Mbeumo.
But first, Carvalho has already jogged in from the blindside, having not been picked up after regaining the ball earlier in the move — and is able to chest it to Mbeumo, who, with seven West Ham defenders around him in a perfect circle, looks as if he has taken advantage of the confusion to create his own forcefield.
The volleyed finish is superb — for the second week in a row — and Brentford lead.
But in all three games, the start hasn’t been fast enough that Brentford could fly away. They’ve failed to win all three games, losing to City and Tottenham, and were pegged back to 1-1 by West Ham.
Frank’s side have not scored from a mid-game kick-off routine after conceding — for that matter, they will not have scored a Premier League goal between the second and 90th minute for the whole of September.
So, set your watches. Wolverhampton Wanderers at the Gtech, October 5, 3.01pm.
