Beesotted contributor, Nemone Sariman, looks back at a magical Saturday night in West London that left Brentford fans celebrating and salty Tricky Trees fans seething all the way back to Nottingham. 
I have a West Ham-supporting friend (hear me out, please) who owns a pair of lucky West Ham socks. A couple of years ago she made an announcement on social media, with fanfare, flashing lights and everything, to announce that she would be wearing them on 30th December 2022, when West Ham played Brentford. 
Of course, we all know how that went.
My friend?s following social media post showed the lucky West Ham socks in the bin. And they have never been mentioned again. 
Most of us probably stopped believing in magic when we were about ten years old. I teach teenagers so I know what a cynical bunch they are, declaring everything to be Fake News or Photoshop or, like, ?whatever?. Yet there is something about a lucky talisman or ritual that gives us a bit of oomph. Interestingly, even if we use them and things don?t go our way, unlike my Hammer friend, who saw sense and consigned those socks to the only place that they deserved to be, we don?t stop or change what we do. We still continue closing our eyes when that penalty is taken, saying that little prayer at kick-off or wearing those lucky socks (not West Ham ones, obviously). We seem to need the feeling of that external force giving us that extra, intangible SOMETHING. Until last Saturday we had had a bad run of arguably winna...