The Premier League weekend concludes with the Monday Night Football which is all about London this week as two sides at the wrong end of the table meet when West Ham United play host to Brentford at the London Stadium.
These two clubs begin the night inside the bottom five in the table but both can move up the league a little should they win the game so that will add extra incentive to a match which was always going to be competitive anyway.
Where to watch
The match will be shown live and in full on the Monday Night Football programme which will be shown live and in full on the Sky Sports Main Event and Sky Sports Premier League channels. The show begins at 6.30pm ahead of the 8pm kick off.
West Ham United
The Hammers went into the season with the inevitable kind of on the horizon and as soon as they got off to a poor start the Graham Potter experiment was never going to have much life left in it. To their credit they didn’t kick that particular can down the road and sorted out the issue at the first opportunity and now they will be looking for the Nuno era to move them clear of danger and up the table as quickly as is possible.
To be fair to the former Wolves, Tottenham and Nottingham Forest manager, they got a creditable result at Everton in his first game and can’t really be judged on a match at Arsenal but with a couple more weeks to get his ideas across this is a game he can be assessed on. We know that he will set West Ham up to be hard to break down and looking to capitalise on transition moments but Brentford will know that too and it will be interesting to see whether the Hammers can solve the puzzle.
Brentford
There were certainly fears from outside the Gtech Community Stadium that Brentford would struggle this season. It often raises alarm bells when teams appoint a rookie manager at this level even if they have been on the coaching staff previously, but particularly when they replace a successful coach who had been there for a while, as was the case with Thomas Frank. To be fair to Keith Andrews, Brentford are going along at a point a game and were probably good for an extra point at Sunderland so they are certainly keeping the dogs at bay so far.
The obvious thing that they are going to need to improve on is their defensive output. They have only kept one clean sheet in their opening seven matches and that doesn’t feel like a profitable statistic. To their credit, the only team to keep them scoreless this season were Manchester City so generally they find the back of the net in matches so if they can keep clean sheets they are going to win plenty of football matches.
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Team News
Nuno Espirito Santo has suggested that Niclas Fullkrug remains unavailable for this match which means that he will select from Callum Wilson or Callum Marshall as the central point of the attack. Tomas Soucek is available after suspension.
Keith Andrews has confirmed that Reiss Nelson and Gustavo Nunes came through an under-21 game in the international break and are in the squad for this one but the match comes too soon for Aaron Hickey and Paris Maghoma.
Betting
It is never easy betting on matches where a relatively new manager is involved and maybe even more so when an international break clouds the situation further and that leads me to leaving the match betting alone but given that only a misfiring at the time Aston Villa have failed to score against Brentford and only Manchester City have stopped the Bees from scoring, the 8/11 on both teams to score here feels like it is a big price.
West Ham haven’t yet kept a clean sheet under Nuno and while you would imagine that will change in time, the aerial bombardment that Brentford are going to serve up might ensure that this isn’t the time. West Ham should offer something with the quality that they have in wide areas and classy operators such as Lucas Paqueta more centrally to suggest that while this might not be an end to end, wide open classic, that both teams can find the back of the net.
Tips
Back Both teams to score for a 3/10 stake at 1.73 with Spreadex
