Frank ‘very proud’ despite Bees dropping more points

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Thomas Frank says he is proud of his Brentford players’ performance in the 1-1 draw with Cardiff.

The result realistically ended the Bees’ chances of winning automatic promotion to the Premier League and was their sixth draw in seven games, and second in four days following Saturday’s goalless stalemate with Millwall.


And Frank felt his team had learned from that London derby, saying: “I said to the players that I was very proud of them, because especially if you look at the Millwall game, I think we upped our game, I think we learned from that.

“I think we definitely had the cutting edge in the final third to create bigger chances, and we didn’t have enough cutting edge to put it into the back of the net.

“We of course need to take our chances, but it is more easier said than done.”

Frank said that over the run of drawn games, he could see from the match statistics and from watching the encounters back, that the Bees had created more chances than their opponents.

He said: “I know those need to go in the back of the net but that’s just shown me that we performed well and should have had more. We don’t – that’s football, that’s margins, so we need to keep a good head, a good mindset, keep going and focus on the next game (at Bournemouth on Saturday).”

Reflecting on the match, he added: “I think we played with a crazy high tempo throughout the game and I don’t think Cardiff could cope with it. I think we created a lot of good situations – unfortunately we couldn’t take them enough.”

Frank insisted that even though automatic promotion is virtually beyond the Bees now, their approach to matches would not alter.

He explained: “We focus on the next game as we have done the whole season – that’s the same on Saturday against a very good team, against Bournemouth.

“We need to keep going, keep believing and then when it’s mathematically not an option any more, we must still focus on the next game because we still want to end as high as possible, we still want to build a momentum.”