Dean Smith feels his side need to improve at both ends of the pitch as they head to The AMEX Stadium on Friday night for the Sky Bet Championship clash against high-flying Brighton and Hove Albion. A 1-1 draw with Leeds United last time out leaves The Bees eight points outside the top six ahead of their trip to the fifth placed Seagulls. With no more midweek matches until the end of the month Dean believes this will give him a good opportunity to work on things with the squad, rather than just patching players up to get them back onto the pitch for midweek matches.
“Every game in this league is tough but playing only on Saturday’s does give us a bit of a breather during the week now,” said Dean, speaking to Bees Player ahead of the match. “Rather than just resting and recovering you can actually get some coaching work done on the training ground. When I first came here we were scoring goals for fun but now we are creating enough chances but not being clinical enough. We should have put the Leeds United game to bed such was our superiority in the first-half but we didn’t and that is something we want to get better at.
“I have talked about us creating a lot of chances and not taking them but on the other side of it we have got to learn how, when we do take the lead, to win 1-0. We haven’t kept as many clean sheets as we would have liked and we have to get better at that. We will always be aggressive and try to get that next goal, to kill teams off, but a few more clean sheets would do nicely as well.”
Brentford travel to Brighton tomorrow night hoping to extend their unbeaten run in the league against The Seagulls to four matches. The Bees did the double over The Seagulls last season and had the better of the encounter at Griffin Park this Boxing Day but couldn’t find a way through in a 0-0 stalemate and Dean is expecting another tough encounter against Chris Hughton’s side.
“Chris has done a fantastic job from when he took over,” said Dean. “For them to be challenging and to go so long unbeaten is proof that they have a very good squad there. They are within touching distance of the top two and that is what they will be looking at. We were very good against them on Boxing Day but we didn’t take our chances. We had 22 attempts on goal to their four so we want goals this time.”
Dean has been boosted in recent weeks by the return to fitness of a number of long-term injured players. Lewis Macleod, Josh McEachran and Marco Djuricin are all now in first team contention and the Head Coach also revealed that Scott Hogan has rejoined physical training after nearly 18 months out with a recurring knee injury.
“Scott Hogan has joined in to physical training with us now which is great,” said Dean. “It will be like a new signing when he gets back. He needs some Development Squad games first but I saw what a great player he was when we was at Rochdale. It is great to have him back fully with us on the training ground now. Alan McCormack is still fighting back from his calf injury, that will probably take another two weeks but other than that it is a fully fit squad. We have got an awful lot of long-term injuries coming back as well. Lewis Macleod is back fully in training and is in the squad for tomorrow.”
Bees Player subscribers can watch the full interview with Dean below