Significant advantages build up for Newcastle United at Brentford’s expense | OneFootball

Newcastle United travelled to Brentford last weekend.

That match of course ending up in a 4-2 home win.

Eleven days after that, the chance for Newcastle United to get their revenge.

That revenge would be the chance for Eddie Howe’s team to move into the Carabao Cup semi-finals at the expense of Brentford.

No Premier League club has currently got less away points than Brentford, they and Southampton with only one apiece.

Ahead of Wednesday night, nobody connected to Newcastle United can complain as well about other factors falling in NUFC’s favour, on top of the obvious home advantage.

Whilst Southampton play Tottenham at 7pm on Sunday night (tonight), Brentford are playing at Chelsea, same day and time.

The Southampton match is live on TNT Sports but the Chelsea one doesn’t even have that excuse for this daft kick-off timing.

Instead, the reason is because of the journey that Chelsea had for their midweek UEFA Conference League game. Enzo Maresca and (some of…) his Chelsea players had a round trip of 16 hours to and from Kazakhstan, for Thursday afternoon’s match against Astana.

The long journey to and from the game led to this Chelsea Premier League match against Brentford pushed back to the latest slot available, which was 7pm on Sunday night.

Great for Newcastle United but a bit rough on Brentford to say the least.

Thomas Frank and Brentford unsuccessfully requested a change to an earlier kick-off time ahead of the Carabao Cup quarter-final with Newcastle United on Wednesday, but were refused.

Thomas Frank stating:

“I think 7pm is a bit odd.

“In general, I don’t care if we play 11am or 10am, we do what we do when it is the TV people who pay our mortgages.

“We asked for it [kick-off against Chelsea to be brought forward from 7pm Sunday] because of the Carabao Cup quarter-final away to Newcastle on Wednesday.”

I think we’d be fuming for sure if this was Newcastle United having to be disadvantaged before a huge cup quarter-final to do Chelsea a favour. Especially when so many Chelsea first teamers didn’t even travel to Kazakhstan, never mind how few actually played in that Conference match.

On the face of it as well, this Chelsea away match looks to be one of Brentford’s toughest Premier League games of the season. So having to play that and when it finishes it will be only around 70 hours before kick-off at St James’ Park on Wednesday night.

Naturally that doesn’t mean Newcastle United will automatically win, but for sure, this has to be a positive for NUFC.

Eddie Howe must have also been not only very pleased with the fact United won against Leicester on Saturday, but also the huge bones that going 4-0 up on 60 minutes, meant he could then take off the likes of Isak, Livramento, Murphy, Bruno and Gordon, to ensure they have every chance of being in best possible shape for the quarter-final. Not forgetting of course that the substitutions then also allowed valuable minutes for players such as Trippier and Osula.

Eddie Howe couldn’t have wrote a better script pre-match.

No apparent new injuries, plus no red cards that would have ruled NUFC players out of the cup match.

Thomas Frank having to go through both of those jeopardies (red cards and injuries) tonight, a full-on tough match that looks sure to test them and where Brentford won’t be able to hold anything back ahead of playing Newcastle United.

No black and white chickens getting counted just yet but now simply a case of Newcastle United playing to the levels of recent home matches against Chelsea, Arsenal, Liverpool and Leicester, then every chance of moving into the semi-finals on Wednesday night.