Brentford 1-0 Stoke City
by Daniel Nolan
at Griffin Park

DELIGHTED Brentford boss Thomas Frank insisted he’d “really wanted” his B-team’s 1-0 win against Stoke yesterday, despite having made an almost complete squad rotation for the tie.

18-year-old Jan Zamburek ran over a 43rd-minute free kick to let recently re-arrived Emiliano Marcondes curl in a right-footer that bypassed all obstacles — including young Potters keeper Adam Davies’s flapping palm — on its way to the top right corner.
 
With 10 changes for the high-flying Bees and seven for Championship stragglers Stoke, a largely incohesive first half thankfully improved in the second — particularly for Brentford, whose new arrival Halil Dervisoglu and 19-year-old Dru Yearwood shone in midfield.
 
Speaking after the game, Frank said: “My wish-list for this game is almost totally completed.

”We got a win, we got massively important minutes to a lot of players who haven’t played that much. We showed that we have a clear identity in the club in terms of how we want to play, so we can swap 9-10 players in the starting line-up.”
 
Announcing that he’d “done his research,” Frank said: “We’ve got a team out there that was 20.1 years in average age against another side that had 24.5 in average age from the starting 11. The starting line-up of Stoke had more than 9,000 Championship minutes this season, we had 2,000. So honestly I’m so impressed.”
 
He said: “I really wanted to win today, and in the end I was — for various reasons — I didn’t want an extra game. But I really wanted to win, to go to the next round, because we want to progress in the FA Cup but also that gave me an extra game to keep some of the reserves [for the league].”