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Of course, the question was whether the Irishman could repeat the trick, a question he and his Brentford team have answered with aplomb in the opening weeks of the season.<\/p>\n
Andrews’ side have four points from their first two Premier League games, and cruised into the 3rd round of the EFL Cup with a crushing 6-1 win over Birmingham.<\/p>\n
With no European football to distract them, Brentford are set up to have a real tilt at a top-six finish this season if all goes well, with Damien Duff now Andrews’ right-hand man.<\/p>\n
Brentford expert Billy Grant believes that the steps forward the team have made over the summer could be down to Duffer.<\/p>\n
Duff already having big Brentford impact<\/strong><\/p>\n Billy Grant of\u00a0The Pride of West London podcast spoke to us this week about the impact that Damien Duff has had since being appointed as Keith Andrews’ assistant.<\/p>\n “I don’t think it’s too early to say how he is influencing Brentford at all,” he told us.<\/p>\n People obviously like to bring their back room staff with them, this was Keith Andrews’ first gig. In effect, he was a junior manager at the time, so he just had to get his feet under the table.<\/p>\n Once he’d proven that he knew what he was doing, he obviously said to the club, ‘I want to bring my people in.’ He always had Damien as somebody who he wanted to bring onboard.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n There has been a steeliness about Brentford this year, and an ability to put teams to the sword that was missing last year.<\/p>\n Their final pre-season friendly saw them smack Eintracht Frankfurt 7-0, before a 3-0 drubbing of Spurs and the aforementioned cup mauling of Birmingham.<\/p>\n Brentford’s newfound physical and mental edge is something that Billy believes has been instilled by Damien Duff.<\/p>\n To me, there’s a question that we asked Keith in this interview that we did with him in Pride of West London. We said, ‘Keith, listen, we’re a great side, we’ve played some great football, everyone’s always praising us about the way we go about things. Don’t you think that we’re a little bit nice? Don’t you think we need to have a little bit more of an edge to us?’<\/p>\n I wouldn’t say he was taken aback by it, but he defended it. He said, ‘No, we’re not quote a nice team, we have got edges to it, but we may do it in different ways by the way that we might kind of go in for tackles.’<\/p>\n It’s interesting, Damien came in this season, obviously Keith’s brought him in to do a particular job. You can see that he’s put some sort of a mark, I believe, on the team.<\/p>\n He’s given them a little bit of an edge, the way that they play their football. It’s almost like they’ve got a slightly more winners’ mentality.<\/p>\n We never really got anywhere in the cups, when you got to a situation where we needed to do something big, we never quite got there.<\/p>\n I think Damien Duff has just given us this edge, which has given us…it’s just a tougher edge. First to the ball. Everyone’s talking about the fact that we’re very athletic. The way that we move for the ball…I think that he’s had a big part to play in that.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Judging by the persona Duff held during his time as Shelbourne manager, it’s easy to imagine him taking a hardened approach to his role as Brentford assistant, and it seems to be paying off.<\/p>\n\n
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