Good evening and welcome to our Monday night football blog, where we will taking the mildly unconventional approach of bringing you coverage of two matches. There’s FA Cup action from Coventry City, who welcome Maidstone United, and then there’s Premier League action where West Ham United host Brentford. We will have news, team lineups and build up to both of those. The FA Cup match at Coventry kicks off at 7.45pm; and this London derby, such as it is, is at 8pm.
For West Ham, an important home fixture, because they are not in a good way. If they fail to win today that is going to be nine straight without a win, their worst run since March 2011. It has been an awful 2023 so far for the Hammers, dumped out of the Cup by Bristol City, pumped by Arsenal and, arguably the most worrying result, defeated by Nottingham Forest in their last fixture. They’re still in the top half though, just about (tenth) but there are some who have had enough of David Moyes.
Here is the Moyesiah (as was) talking about tonight’s opponents, who have beaten the Hammers in each and every one of their five Premier League meetings: “Brentford have got a bit of everything about them. They can play, they can be direct, they’re an exceptional team at set-pieces.
“I think they maximise a lot of their players. They’ve got a structure of what type of players they want to bring in and what they expect.
“They probably don’t have the budget other teams have but they go out looking for the types of players who fit their model. To be fair they’ve done it really well for several seasons now.”
As for the FA Cup match, it’s the National League South side against the 1987 winners. Can the minnows summon the spirit of Brian Kilkline etc and pull off a huge upset? That would certainly be some story…