Thomas Frank confident good times will come for Brentford after latest play-off failure

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Thomas Frank’s message to his heartbroken Brentford players on Tuesday night was that the sun would still rise in the morning. How many of them, though, will still be around to see a new Championship season dawn in little over five weeks’ time?

The Dane was left gutted at missing out on the chance to “attack the Premier League” with this swashbuckling side and admits he does not know if he will be able to keep them together.

In 26-goal forward Ollie Watkins and playmaker Said Benrahma, Brentford have two players who they might have struggled to hold onto even had they triumphed at Wembley.

Ahead of another season in the Championship, the club will be reluctant to lose two such talismanic figures in one summer.

Watkins, who signed a new long-term contract a year ago, is the more likely to stay and the more important to keep, given the value of a prolific striker and the dearth of other options in Frank’s squad. Both, however, deserve to be playing Premier League football and Frank has previously suggested that at least one would likely be sold if they did not go up.

“It’s not my biggest concern right now,” Frank said. “The reason why I’m most down is mainly for the fans, for [owner] Matthew Benham, the people who have been at the club for many years. They deserve so much to be in the Premier League.

“I believe so much in this group of players and I’m very disappointed that we won’t have the opportunity to attack the Premier League. No one knows what will happen tomorrow. I just know we’ll have a very strong side going into the Championship next season.”

Brentford have undergone successful rebuilds after losing their best players before and the club’s strong contract stance and desertion of the loan system — not one loanee has made a League appearance in the last three seasons — means they will not see any go without serious renumeration.

Only last summer, Neal Maupay, Ezri Konsa and Romaine Sawyers were sold for well over £30million, that cash invested in six new first-team starters — Bryan Mbuemo, David Raya, Pontus Jansson, Mathias Jensen, Christian Norgaard and Ethan Pinnock — with plenty of change left over.

Action Images via Reuters

The scale of the job needed this time will depend on the appetite of a young squad brimming with talent. For all bar Jansson, this was a first-ever crack at reaching the top flight and Frank will be desperate to convince the likes of Josh Dasilva and Rico Henry that it will be worth sticking around for another go.

“My message was that I was extremely proud of them,” Frank added. “They’ve been giving everything for thirteen-and-a-half months in a long and weird season. I said before the game, what a fantastic group of players, a brilliant team of staff but, more important, an unbelievable group of people.

“In football and in life you need to be strong, because there’ll be situations that don’t go the way you wanted. You need to show resilience if you want to achieve something big. I’m 100 per cent sure we’ll be back better next season.”

A new era is coming at Brentford, as they prepare to kick-off the new campaign in a new home, albeit without the accompanying fairytale of a new division to boot. The more of the same faces involved, the better.

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