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Orient and Brentford fans alongside ex Brentford and Orient player Carl Hutchings discussed on the FanStand live fan debate (as can be seen on the above video) Mark Warburton’s surprising claim that 90 points will be enough to secure promotion. After analysis, BillytheBee thinks 90 points is not so pie in the sky

When Mark Warburton said Brentford needed 90 points to achieve promotion a few days before the Orient game, he caused a few raised eyebrows. Only a few weeks before, he professed that Brentford needed 94 or 95 points to achieve their promotion target. But now the goalposts had interestingly been moved days before the massive 6 pointer.

I thought about this long and hard. Surely he’s got it wrong I thought. Brentford must get 94 or 95 points to ensure that we steer clear of Orient in 3rd place. If we assumed back then (before the Orient game) Wolves weregoing to win the top spot (which is by no means guaranteed), it’s all about the battle for 2nd place for promotion. And according to Warburton, 90 points will secure that second place.

But as I thought about it more and more, it all started to make sense.

Mark Warburton has always stated publicly “We’ll take one game at a time”. But let’s be realistic. Brentford’s path to the end of the season had already been mapped out when he made that statement. And Warburton knew for the Bees to get a really decent foothold in the promotion race, both position-wise and psychologically, he knew Brentford HAD to beat Orient. If we drew against them, we were undoubtedly still in a great position. If we lost, we then had much much more work to do in the forthcoming games.

But beat Orient and he knew that really would set us up nicely for the back end of the season.

No wonder the Warburton, the players and the fans celebrated like they had won the FA Cup.

As discussed in the FanStand live discussion, Mark Warburton is no fool. He’s an ex City Trader. He’s more than a little adept with numbers. He spent years analysing the probability of what would happen if the Forex Market went either bullish or bearish. Last season, Doncaster won the league with a ‘mere’ 84 points. The Bees are now 8 points off that with 11 games to go. He knew if we beat Orient, Brentford would be one game closer to his 90 point target. Whereas Orient would have the same target having played two games more and being 2 points behind the Bees.

Four more wins and two draws from eleven games for the Bees gets us to the magic 90. Seems a bit light doesn’t it? Whereas Orient need five wins and one draw from nine games using Warburton’s theory. When you put it that way, that seems quite steep.

Every game we win, Orient need to also win to keep pace. You can now see why he set the target at 90 points. Any slip and and Orient are sweating. If Orient buck the trend and go on an end of season winning run, whereas either Brentford or Wolves fall off, the ball park changes once again.

But as lovely as it is to be in this position, we all know this doesn’t mean job done. There is still a lot of hard work to be done on the horizon from the players, the management and the fans. If Wolves or more to the point Brentford (god forbid) were to have a severe about turn-in form, the promotion race will be blown right open again. If you start to lose games at the business end of the season, you can’t presume you are going to achieve automatic promotion.

The ball is firmly in our court and it’s up to all of us to ensure we don’t blow it.

The support at Orient was fantastic and no doubt helped the players keep their resolve under very tricky conditions (12 v 10 men). We may not be able to contribute on the pitch but we have 11 games in which we can make a massive contribution off it.

So as we go into the games against Coventry and Rotherham, we all now have a good idea what we have to do to get over the finish line. We’d love to win all our remaining matches but if we don’t it’s not the end of the world.

Because at least we now know worst case scenario that, as Phil ‘Noddy’ Holder famously said the last time we got promoted to The Championship, this one will go all the way to the wire.

I bet you would have all taken that after the Stevenage game last year.

BillytheBee
@billythebee99