Ben Burgess became a fan favourite at Griffin Park during the 2001/02 campaign, netting 18 goals in 51 appearances while on loan from Blackburn Rovers.
In total, led the line for ten clubs during a 14-year career.
Now a teacher in Lancashire, Ben still keeps a close eye on the Bees and will be providing his thoughts ahead of each game this season.
Fine margins
One thing impacting football matches recently is the strange phenomenon of varying goal post sizes.
Cardiff accused their opponents Wigan Athletic of having posts that were two inches above the standard height.
Cardiff manager Mark Hudson was told it would take two hours to rectify so he was forced to play the game.
In a strange twist of fate, Cardiff won 3-1 with their third goal hitting the underside of the crossbar (in the taller goal) before crossing the line.
In a truly bizarre coincidence, Hull had to delay their game against Birmingham City at the MKM stadium while two inches were shaved off the posts to make them regulation height. Just like the Cardiff game, the away team went on to win.
This is probably going to happen more frequently now people are aware of discrepancies in goal sizes.
In another completely new scenario for football, Leeds United’s game against Arsenal was delayed because of a power cut that sent the VAR system offline.
I could only imagine the chaos (or not) if they played the game without VAR!
The power cut reminded me of a great excuse my former team-mate Jon Harley came up with when he was late for training at Notts County.
Harls had a much more successful career than the rest of us after gracing the Premier League with the likes of Chelsea, Fulham and Sheffield United.
We knew he must have had a nice palatial home but when he rang the manager to say he had had a power cut and couldn’t get to training because his electrical front gates wouldn’t open, we all had to laugh. Talk about problems of the rich and famous!
Clued up
The term intelligent footballer, in an academic sense, used to be an oxymoron.
Anybody showing a slight intelligence and opposing the traditional rags to riches professional footballer story was often treated like a pariah.
Think Graeme Le Saux, who is the one player from my childhood who sticks out because he was associated with reading.
He was always talked about as an outlier, and that was the nicest thing he was labelled!
I always enjoyed school and especially reading, but subconsciously I moved away from it during my teenage years because it wasn’t expected of me.
The only reading materials on a coach trip to an away game were not exactly intellectual: Nuts, FHM, The Sun and usually a Racing Post.
I believe things are improving and players like Marcus Rashford are showing that education is important, but even he has been criticised in some quarters for spending ‘too much time’ helping millions of children with his campaigns and not playing well enough on the pitch.
Intelligence off the pitch is clearly an extremely helpful quality on the pitch.
Manuel Akanji, Manchester City’s new defensive signing, is making headlines for his seamless transition into English football and into Pep Guardiola's rather complex system. There’s a great video doing the rounds of him answering complex mathematics questions in seconds.
Guardiola explained that some players have to be told things ten times to understand the basics, whereas Akanji and other intelligent players need to be told just once and they get it, making it far easier for them to transition to a new team and a new country.
Hopefully, footballers answering maths questions on TV won’t be such a shocking scene in the future. Being curious and intelligent should be celebrated and not ridiculed.