Started alright, had a good chance to begin and should really have capitalised on it or at least had a shot.
Sending off changes the half completely. My first reaction watching that live was that it was a red card. He lunged, it was high, it injured the opponent. But everything else - awful. Not just the ref, linos were terrible too. Thought they were wrong on multiple throws and missed a couple of offside calls too, one of which ultimately leads to the free kick (throws himself into the air dramatically) where they score. Brentford throw themselves to the floor all the time, frustrating to watch even if we're all familiar now. Also think they should have had a red, I didn't see the incident at the very end however so no clue what happened.
Once down to ten men we were really bad in the first half, could not get into the game and had zero output. No shots. Brentford had a couple opportunities but were very wasteful although did manage to put the one away. We seemed like a side beaten.
Second half was a total transformation, you could barely tell we were a man down. We were so much quicker with the ball and looked to get it forwards a lot, Neto/Cunha/Bellegarde all worked really hard and connected well. Neto looked sharp, very very lively and gave Brentford a difficult time all night. Lovely goal by Doyle and he put in a lot of effort tonight but his passing still is not good enough for me, lacks quality. Doherty is also a glaring weakness for the usual reasons, especially how one-footed he is as a left back, although it's on Brentford for not targeting him. Good performance by Bueno, lots of positives.
Brentford are not very good. Their goalkeeper and Collins have shocking distribution, and they also struggled a lot with some pretty standard balls over the top, think it was Baptiste in partiular who had problems. Feel like the extra man would have made the difference there as we could not press them as much as we should have, although even without pressure Brentford struggled. They also looked devoid of ideas, kept going for the inswinging cross which was (with the exception of the goal) mopped up pretty easily by Sa and the defence.
Maybe I'm speaking with gold-tinted specs but second half it felt like there was only one potential winner and that was us. Good second half performance, great reaction to being a goal and man down (O'Neil does deserve credit there), fans in good voice, fun away day.
Glad we are still in it. Let's win the replay.