Brentford beat West Bromwich Albion at Griffin Park on Friday night in front of a crowd that barely made three figures. Ollie Watkins scored the only goal as The Bees climbed to third in the Sky Bet Championship, beating the team that started the day top of the table. Brentford are five points behind West Brom with seven games to go.

With games played behind closed doors due to the Covid-19 outbreak, there were very few people in the ground. Journalists were allowed in and one of them was Jim Levack. Jim has been a Brentford fan all his life and has covered the Club for decades. Currently working for PA Media, Jim wrote a first-person piece on his experience.

As the great Peter Gilham and, I think, Charles Dickens once wrote “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times”.

Three points taken from the league leaders, a display of controlled aggression, desire and technical flashes of genius, momentum is now very much on our side.

This Brentford squad is without a shadow of a doubt the best I’ve seen in 50 odd – and some of them have been very odd – years.

But without fans, this win, historic in many ways, was also the strangest experience I’ve ever had in a stadium that’s a spiritual home to us all.

That it didn’t worry the players is a tribute to them. They are deep in the zone and the spirit of togetherness that you could see and hear without the distraction of partisan fans was palpable.

This was football in its purest form stripped of crowd-charged emotion. But more important than that, it was a display of power forged by a strength that only unity and shared vision can bring.

Jim's piece appears in full on the website of Beesotted, the Brentford fans network. See it all here.