🗣 Sam Saunders: "To get eight goals is good because we've been working on a lot of attacking play."

The Brentford goals came from an own goal, Matej Majka, Jaden Brissett, Aubrel Koutsimouka, two trialists, and Christian Tue Jensen as the team played their first match following the international break and returned to action in style.

On the win, The Bees’ coach said: “Winning games is always what we want to do. Even though it was a friendly it’s about that winning mentality, and we work hard on the training ground all week, and even in our training sessions every day is competitive, and you want to win.

“To get eight goals is good because we’ve been working on a lot of attacking play in the last few weeks with three-v-twos and three-v-threes. To get the goals was good, but we were disappointed with how we started the second half as we conceded an early goal after being 4-0 up at half-time. We said to the lads to go out again and win the second half, so to go down for a few minutes in the second half we weren’t too happy with. We pushed the boys and they reacted well and started pressing higher again to force the mistakes, and we got a few more goals near the end which puts a bit of gloss on the score line.”

With a number of the players being off on international duty in recent weeks, and without a game since Wednesday 2 October, Sam was pleased for the players to get back into their rhythm.

He continued: “Being picky, we could have had a couple more (goals), but we want to keep pushing the boys, and it was one of those where we haven’t had a game for a couple of weeks because of the international break. It’s good to get some minutes into the legs of the boys for the ones that haven’t been away, and those that had been away but hadn’t played many minutes. We’ve got two games coming up next week which will be a good test and the boys are in a good place after a strong week’s training.”

Sam admitted that he wasn’t too pleased with how the side prepared for the match in the warmup, but explained he was delighted to then see the players take on the staff’s messages as they found the net within the first minute before the other seven goals followed.

“The warmup was shocking,” said Sam. “I said to the boys before the game: ‘listen, we’ve got these key points that we want to do in the game, but the warmup wasn’t showing any of them.’ After about 10 seconds they shut me up and we got the reaction that we wanted. We started off well and they took on board what we said before the game and went until the 90th minute. We don’t expect anything else from these lads, they’re brilliant, they’re really fun to work with and they give you everything. That’s all we can ask for.”

One of the match highlights was substitute Christian Tue Jensen’s free-kick from out on the left which curled in expertly into the far corner, and Sam praised the forward for his dedication to keep on improving.

He explained: “He’s got good quality, every time he’s around the box you always fancy him to hit the target. He works really hard and deserves his goal because he puts the hours in at the training ground and the technique is there for everyone to see.”

Brentford B will now set their sights on Reading Under-23s on Wednesday evening at Griffin Park in a 7:30pm kick-off. And the former Bees midfielder is encouraging as many supporters as possible to head down to the stadium to back the boys.

He continued: “It’s a good game, a stadium game is always good under the lights at Griffin Park and there’s not too many of them left unfortunately. It will be good to get back there and hopefully we can get a few through the doors. They’re good games, it’s not like an academy game where we’ll let teams have the ball and then we have the ball, we like to get at teams and play entertaining football on the front foot. If they (the supporters) come down on Wednesday night, then I’m sure they will have something to smile about.”