As the Bees travel up to South Yorkshire, it’s a must win for both teams. Brentford needing a win to keep their playoff flame flickering. Whereas Barnsley need a win to ensure that their relegation battle goes right down to the wire.

 Billy Grant caught up with Lucy Dawn (@LucyDawn89) from The Barnsley Blog to get the lowdown on the Tykes’ season so far

That Forest result really seems to have been the death knell for Barnsley. You have two more matches – home against its and away against Derby. Do you honestly think you will pull it out the bag?
Personally, I think the Forest game was our chance to secure an all-important three points to give us just a small glimmer of hope. We’ve made it extra difficult for ourselves now and perhaps Forest was the kiss of death. We haven’t got much fight in us to be fair and what’s worse, we can’t rely on other results either.

Has the new manager José Morais not quite got a handle on the division do you think? Or do you think the players need to take some of the blame?
It’s not fair to fully blame Morais for this mess as we seemed to be in it before he came. I guess if you look at it from a cultural point of view. Perhaps Morais has had a different experience to what we expect. I also think that some of the players should hold their hands up too. There are a few who haven’t played to their full potential. The flip side of the argument is that some of them are played out of natural positions or are dropped for no obvious reasons.

Not everyone will agree though and each one of our fans will have something different to suggest in terms of placing blame somewhere.

You spoke on the Beesotted Pride of West London Podcast this week (above) giving us The Knowledge on Barnsley. How did the takeover affect the team’s performance? Did the new Chinese owners Chien Lee and co – who were also interested in buying a stake in Brentford – invest in the club at all? Morais indicated after the Forest game that they beat you because they have better players. Is that a fair comment?
I don’t think the takeover directly affected the team’s performance. Obviously, the fact that Patrick Cryne (rest in peace Patrick) was all and everyone knew that a takeover was imminent will have been something playing on the players’ minds. I don’t seem to recall the owners investing very much, if at all, any money in January. In fact there doesn’t seem to have been much in the way of investments at all.

New hand dryers and hot water in the toilets though came as a surprise and was perhaps their first steps to improve what they’re calling the ‘fan experience’.

I hope and expect that they will be ready to spend in the summer…and I hope league 1 prospects don’t put them off!

I’ve not heard Morais’ comments post Forest game. I tend to avoid them as they’re often nonsensical. If his comments were accurate, I don’t think it’s fair for him to say that. The players are his responsibility and so it should be him that ensures the players are fit so that we can match teams like Forest.

Six changes to the side left us with an inconsistency. So maybe it’s not the players that are rubbish at all but more like a lack of confidence. Forest were definitely the better team on the night.

Heckingbottom seemed to have a handle on Barnsley. When we played you pretty much 12 months ago, you gave us a tough game up there. And at Griffin Park at Xmas, you were hard to beat.

I think Heckingbottom knew the lads well. He’d been in charge from Feb 2016, and took us up. He lost a lot of his squad in the summer but persevered with what he had. He did do a good job and I guess if you look back to last season, there wasn’t an enormous amount of pressure at this time.

This season, Heckingbottom learned to work with what he had, although there were some cracks appearing even before he left. The summer transfer window baffled many as we brought in midfielders galore. The majority of our recruitment comes from lower leagues…hopefully that is something we can improve on with money in our pockets.

Obviously, losing players is also disappointing but back in August we couldn’t pay a wage so high and players left for better options. I can’t comment on Heckingbottom going to Leeds…Snake is the word that truly fits! After countless times of him saying he hated Leeds, the thing you expect the least is him to go to Leeds. He had much better offers prior to this…

Your pal Joe Beardshall from Red All Over appeared on Beesotted Radio Show on Love Sport Radio this week (above). He wasn’t massively optimistic of Barnsley getting a result. This game should be called the ‘half chance’ match as we both have half a chance of achieving our goal – puts to reach the playoffs. And you to avoid relegation. It’s a must win for both really. How do you think it will pan out?
I really can’t see us getting a win in this game. We’ve parked the bus already and there’s little to no fight in us. Players say that they are fighting, but this is hardly evident on the field of play.

I guess you could blame the manager making several changes per game. These changes aren’t useful as they’ve cost us and they’ve cost our players’ confidence. Ideally we need Burton to win, and then for them to lose and Bolton lose the last match of their seasons and us get a win to survive.

We can’t rely on that though and we need to push. I think Brentford are advantaged, but on the day, it depends who wants it the most. I hope I’m proved wrong, but this is us dead and buried with a loss to Brentford.

Score prediction
I always predict a positive outcome for Barnsley, and I never go against them, so for this reason I’m going to go 2-1 Reds!

Realistically though, I feel Brentford will want it more resulting in a Brentford win!

Billy Grant
@BillyTheBee99

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