Brentford 0-0 Fulham: Premier League Match Report

Brentford 0-0 Fulham produced nothing in either half. Goalless at the interval, goalless at the end, and a west London derby that resolved into the safest possible outcome for two teams whose seasons had already stopped asking difficult questions.

It was entirely in keeping with how Brentford had been playing. They came into the round having drawn four in a row — 0-0 at Bournemouth, 2-2 with Wolverhampton, 0-0 at Leeds, 2-2 with Everton — and this made it five, with three of the five goalless. Their previous win, 4-3 at Burnley, sat oddly against everything that had followed. Fulham had been the more volatile of the two, alternating wins and defeats: 2-1 over Tottenham, 0-1 at home to West Ham, 0-0 at Nottingham, 3-1 against Burnley, 0-2 at Liverpool.

The table had them close together and going nowhere in particular. Brentford were seventh on 47 points from 32 matches with a goal difference of +4; Fulham were 12th on 44 with -3. Six points separated Brentford from the top six and eleven separated Fulham from the bottom three, which left this fixture as a derby with local weight and very little league consequence. The reverse meeting at Craven Cottage in September had gone to Fulham 3-1, the last time either side had found goals against the other.

Brentford moved to 48 points, goal difference unchanged at +4, and stayed a point outside the group contesting the last European place with six rounds left. A home draw against a side eleven points below them is not what a team in that position needs, and their record of one win in six said the problem was not this fixture alone.

Fulham went to 45 with -3, another point banked in a season that had long since become about finishing tidily. Three points divided them at kick-off and three did at the whistle. For all the derby framing, the honest summary is that neither club's position, ambition or arithmetic changed in any way over 90 minutes.

Our pre-match call was BTTS Yes at 1.65. It lost, and Brentford's run of draws should have made us look harder before taking it. Two of their four preceding results had finished 0-0, and a fifth successive draw with no goals was not an unusual outcome for them — it was the modal one. We were pricing the fixture off the 3-1 in the reverse meeting and off Fulham's habit of conceding in defeats, which ignored that Fulham's away form under pressure had been tight rather than open. Both teams to score needs at least one of them attacking with intent, and neither did. Verdict: lost