“Any chance?” asks Michael Caulfield, Brentford’s sports psychologist, and with that Paisley, a lurcher-whippet with a marble-cake coat, hops out of the boot of his car at the training ground. He stops for a chat with the groundstaff, on their hands and knees repairing black netting chewed by urban foxes in this part of west London.
“When a fox sees Paisley, they scarper off to Surbiton,” Caulfield says, walking past the place he calls Augusta, by which he means the immaculate pitches in front of the Robert Rowan Performance Centre named after their technical director who died six years ago. “It sounds pathetic but I walked past his portrait this morning and went: ‘1-1 last night [against Sheffield Wednesday], penalties, you wouldn’t believe it, but we got there. Hope we get a home draw.’”
