The Athletic

Hello, I'm Dan Bardell and I'm Flo Lloyd Hughes.

And welcome to the Athletic Football podcast where every Wednesday, Flo and I pick out one article from all the brilliant writing available on The Athletic and put the authors under the spotlight.

This week, Jay Harris, Brentford correspondent for the Athletic, will join us to talk about the B's impressive start to life in the Premier League.

And some of the fascinating ways in which the club were prepared for the big time, including

scrapping their academy.

Yeah, Brentford, a really, really interesting team to talk about.

And I imagine a great team for Jay to cover as well.

We're also going to talk about Ivan Tony, who one of his teammates has compared to Didier

Drugbaugh after the win at Wolves at the weekend.

So plenty to talk about, but Flo will start with the news that Marcus Alonzo has decided

that he isn't going to take the knee pregame anymore. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think his response is a little bit basic. I have to be honest. Obviously, realistically, no one thinks that

taking the knee before a match is going to solve racism. And so it's very naive for him to

think that he should stop now because nothing's changed. I also saw a quote. Someone shared

because someone asked him,

you know, have you talked to your teammates about your decision? And he said, no, he hadn't

actually talked to his teammates. So I think that's probably the most frustrating thing is,

you know, you want, certainly, you would like to think that players are supporting each other,

being allies for each other at a

really important time. And if he was going to make a decision, perhaps he should put that to the

forefront is being an ally for his teammates. But I think a lot of this, you know, I'm a QPR fan

...