Football: Hoddle digs in for point
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Your support makes all the difference.Brentford . . . .0
Swindon Town. . .0
GLENN HODDLE's Christian army, the purveyors of all things bright and beautiful, survived an ugly scrap in the distinctly earth-bound environs of Griffin Park. At 3pm there were 11 of them, but only nine by the half-time whistle. As a second Swindon forward trudged off at the sight of the red card, his normally mild-mannered player-manager sent him on his way with a few well-chosen words from the Anglo-Saxon dictionary. For a moment the halo dimmed, as the promotion chasers could easily have gone on to lose, but Hoddle rallied the remnants of his side and from then on the game had 0-0 written all over it.
Brentford themselves are no striplings, but that was their undoing. If Swindon revealed feet of clay, Brentford took to the task of breaking them down with feet of lead, and could find no way of exploiting their numerical advantage.
This is less surprising than it ought to be. Brentford are not used to the sight of the opposition's billowing net: in mid-week they scored a goal for the first time in 810 minutes of competitive football.
And as is often the way, ceding possession to the other team allowed Swindon to concentrate on defending in numbers. Under Hoddle's supervision at sweeper, where he must have headed the ball more often in the course of 90 minutes than he did in his entire career at Tottenham, they restricted Brentford to one real chance, a header from Marcus Gayle which Hoddle himself cleared off the line.
In fact Brentford came closest to scoring in the first half, Gary Blissett's header from Gayle's cross shaving the wrong side of the post. At the other end Swindon had a couple of shots from Shaun Taylor and Brian Marwood cleared off the line, but the principal incidents of the first half were the dismissals of Steve White, for elbowing Keith Millen in the face, and Dave Mitchell, for two idiotic bookable fouls, the first of them committed immediately after White's departure.
Despite the beavering of Kenny Sansom, making his debut for his third club in three months, and his fourth London club overall, it was Swindon, bringing on the fresh legs of Shaun Close up front, who probably had the better chances in the second half, all of them on the break, the best was rifled over the bar by Paul Bodin. For Swindon it was a victory in every sense but the important one.
Brentford: G Benstead; B Statham, K Sansom, K Millen, T Evans (M Jones, 81 min), S Ratcliffe, P Stephenson, A Dickens, M Gayle, G Blissett, B Manuel. Sub not used: S Westley. Manager: P Holder.
Swindon Town: F Digby; N Summerbee, P Bodin, G Hoddle, C Calderwood, S Taylor, B Marwood (S Close, 67 min), R MacLaren, D Mitchell, M Ling, S White. Sub not used: P Hunt. Player-manager: G Hoddle.
Referee: V Callow (Solihull).
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