“We are worried,” Thomas Frank sighed. “If you only win one in 10, that's clear. We need to look at ourselves.”
That could very easily have been the Brentford manager talking this week, in the aftermath of a damaging defeat to relegation rivals Newcastle. In fact, it came following a 2-0 defeat to Hull City in the Championship in December 2018.
The giveaway? That Brentford’s current slump has actually seen them win just one of their last eleven league games. Having lost nine of the other ten, the Bees are now on officially their worst run of form under Frank, surpassing the 10-game stretch at the start of the Dane’s reign, in which they lost eight and culminated in the aforementioned reverse at Hull.
It looked unlikely then that Frank would be the man to turn things around but, lo-and-behold, he did just that and then some, taking the club to the play-off final the following campaign and then into the Premier League for the first time ever a season later.
There is little doubt that Frank will be given time to right the ship again this time around, nor any doubt that he should be, but if arresting a protracted decline was one of his first major tasks as Brentford manager then it is also an area in which he has had little practice in the three-and-a-bit years since.
On their way to successive third-placed finishes in the Championship, Brentford, naturally, won more games than they lost and if anything, the last two seasons under Frank have been defined by streaks of a different kind.
In 2019/20, Brentford, won eight on the bounce upon returning from the Covid lockdown to come within a whisker of automatic promotion. The following year, after a slow start, they went 21 league games unbeaten to establish themselves as contenders once again.
Frank often talks of his “24-hour rule”, allowing players no more than a day to celebrate or stew on a result, and prides himself on getting neither too high after victories, nor too low after defeats.
Clearly, though, he has fostered an environment in which positive momentum builds quickly and, judging from his unwaveringly upbeat demeanour in recent weeks, does not easily slip away, even in the midst of a downturn like this one.
But while no team arriving in the top-flight on the back of a promotion-winning campaign is used to losing, that is particularly true of this Brentford squad, noted for its lack of Premier League experience of any kind, let alone of a relegation scrap.
The resolve is there, but turning it into the points that will secure safety will require Frank’s biggest turnaround since the one that saved his job after that early-tenure rut.
"You can't ensure anything in this world,” he said after that Hull defeat back in 2018. “But I am 100 per cent sure that me, the players and the coaching staff will do everything we can to turn it around. One win will do massively.”
Ahead of tomorrow’s trip to Norwich, it can’t arrive soon enough.
