Maybe I?m feeling the years, but season 23-24 still feels like a date set way in the future. Surely it should only have come to pass in a long running game of Football Manager; one anchored in the real world accuracy of Stuart Nelson and Charlie Ide at the start. Gradually the game and real-world continuums diverged exponentially, where one Brentford progressed to become a top 10 Premier League side with a striker in the England team. A bit unrealistic you?d have said" That it actually happened in the real world remains joyously hard to believe.
This is the final part of a trilogy that I started in May 2021. The first part was in the immediate delirium of the Championship play-off final, trying to make sense of it all. The second , written early last year, described the experience of being an exiled fan with Brentford in the Premier League, and now this final instalment closes out the return journey, after Covid restrictions finally eased, to see Brentford games again after two and a half years. The last Brentford match I went to prior, was in March 2020. We didn?t know at the time, but it was the last game with fans at Griffin Park. The Bees hammered Sheffield Wednesday 5-0. I was due to go back to Hong Kong in the coming days and as the pandemic started to unfold, I took in an extra sweeping look around the old ground on the way out, fearing that with all the uncertainty, coming back in May might not be possible. I was right.
In July 2022 travel restrictions in and o...