Jake Bidwell thinks that Saturday’s West London derby with Queens Park Rangers is the perfect game to get Brentford’s stuttering season back on track. The Bees have won just once in their last seven matches and are now 17th in the table with 11 games to play. Speaking to Bees Player ahead of the match Jake said everyone in the team understands what the game means to staff and fans alike and thinks a game of such importance could be a great springboard towards the end of the season.
“It is the perfect game to turn it round in and everyone is working hard to make that happen,” said Jake. “We are well aware of how important it is to the fans. You only have to go and speak to Peter Gilham to find that out. It could be a great opportunity to kick start our last 11 games and go on a bit of a run. You have to use the atmosphere to your advantage. It is the same for a player as for a fan. It gets the adrenaline going and I love it.
“You don’t want to be playing in empty stadiums so you have to relish the opportunity, feed off the crowd and use it to your advantage. We have to go out there knowing and believing how good we are. When we do perform we can match anyone but on the other hand we know that if we don’t start performing quickly we will be in trouble. You have to use those to drive you on.”
The Bees have won only twice in 2016 and are now eight points above the Sky Bet Championship relegation zone. With 11 matches of the season to play Jake thinks The Bees need to get some momentum going before the end of the season to pull away from the lower end of the season and send them into the summer on an upward curve.
“We have massively underachieved recently and we are in a position where we are getting drawn into a relegation fight,” said Jake. “That is the way that it is and there is no points dressing it up. We have lost to two teams in the bottom three. It’s an old cliché that you are only as good as your last game and we were beaten by the team bottom of the league. That is where we are at currently and we need to turn it around quickly. There are 11 games left this season and we want to finish on a high and put the building blocks in place to kick on again next season. We still have plenty to play for, including two local derbies.”
The Bees have had a turbulent season off the pitch with key players such as Andreas Bjelland, Alan McCormack and Maxime Colin all missing large parts of the campaign through injury. Added to the departure of a number of last year’s first-team squad Jake said there have been mitigating circumstances around the season. Despite that the former Everton defender believes the current group of players should be doing far better than they have been recently.
“There are possibly mitigating circumstances but you could probably talk to any club in the country and they would tell you the same,” said Jake. “On a Saturday it is still 11 vs 11 and you have to deal with what you have got. The squad that has been playing recently is better than what we have been showing. We have got injuries and players have left who would have made us stronger but the team that has been playing hasn’t been playing as well as we can. We have to focus on that and get back to that as soon as we can. We have shown this season that once we do perform like we are capable of then we are a match for anyone.”
Bees Player subscribers can listen to the full interview with Jake below