Plenty of reasons to be cheerful

The team is endeavouring to play some attractive passing football, we are in the midst of a six-game unbeaten run and Nicky Forster and his assistant Mark Warburton have been rewarded for their sterling work over the past few weeks by being put in charge of the club until the end of the season.

Off the pitch there are reasons to be cheerful too as the supporters have already snapped up in excess of 17,000 tickets for the Paint Pot Trophy – and it seems that Brentford have broken the habit of a lifetime by not making a total hash of organising these ticket sales.

But, unfortunately, my mood was soured badly this week by the arrival at Griffin Park of Paul Ince and his band of not-so-merry men from Nottingham.

Last season, Ince brought his McDons team to TW8 and they proved themselves to be filthier than a Shane Warne text message. And guess what? Notts County with Ince at the helm are just as appalling.

Even before the Magpies had the first of two players sent off they seemed intent on spoiling the game with petty fouls, time wasting and a complete lack of attacking ambition. As the game wore on the fouls got more vicious and the time wasting more ludicrous.

I am reliably informed by those who were positioned closer to the dug-outs that the behaviour of Ince, and his nasty bulldog of an assistant, Alex ‘the archetypal angry Scot’ Rae, was equally as disgraceful as they consistently berated the match officials from the touchline.

It’s not often a team’s approach can be summed up in the looks of its assistant manager but County’s ugly approach seems perfectly personified by Rae’s snarling mug.

I’m not sure what this gruesome twosome are instructing their players to do when they head out on the pitch but clearly it has very little to do with playing football.

Last week, in a TV interview, Ince spoke at length about his dislike for modern football trends. Players wearing coloured boots and snoods in matches and listening to the latest R’n’B nonsense on their Walkmans during interviews has particularly got his goat.

He “believes in respect and doings things the right way” and he has also been left “baffled" by "where the game is going”, apparently.

The answer to the latter question is to hell in a handcart, if all teams adopted Ince's approach to football.

As for “believing in respect”, presumably this belief was uppermost in his mind when he and Rae were dishing out dogs abuse to the officials who were simply trying to curb Notts County’s brutish behaviour.

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