Romaine Sawyers on his Brentford career: Early struggles, captaincy and return to West Brom | OneFootball

Dean Smith was appointed Brentford head coach in November 2015 and, after guiding his inherited side to within nine points of the Championship play-offs, the next summer, he built a squad of his own.

Near the end of the transfer window, he returned to former club Walsall to sign Rico Henry - who is now the club’s longest-serving outfield player - but right at the start of it, he brought Romaine Sawyers in on a free transfer.

Sawyers, too, had made a name for himself with the Saddlers, but after three seasons in League One - the last of which ended in play-off semi-final heartbreak - he was looking to make the step up.

“With the way I am as a player, it's always important to step up with the right manager - and Dean epitomises that,” says Sawyers.

“With the respect I've got for the gaffer, for him to go to Brentford showed me that club was also going to be a similar-thinking club, which was always going to make it easier for me to follow suit. He knew me as a player, but more importantly as a person.”

Moving to London was easy. “It was the first time I lived on my own, so I just wanted to play football and play video games. It was FIFA or Call of Duty back then,” he says with a smile.

But on the pitch, things did not start quite so smoothly.

“If I'm being honest, I struggled at first. I wasn't at the level where I needed to be. I was still a bit slow on the ball sometimes, taking too many touches and my decision making wasn't as quick as it should have always been.

“It didn't help that sometimes I was playing out of position. At Walsall, we played a 4-2-3-1 and I was a no.10, and we did the same at Brentford, but sometimes I’d play as a no.10, sometimes I'd play on the left, sometimes I'd play on the right, sometimes I'd play as one of the double pivots.

“It was a time I was trying to adjust to my team-mates, my surroundings, living away from home for the first time. It wasn’t a case of, after a game I've got 20 minutes to go to my grandparents’ or my mum’s.

“I'm very analytical with my performances, so I was going back to my apartment and watching games back, being critical, phoning friends or my agent or people I've trusted to have conversations.

“Then we got a psychologist at Brentford [Michael Caulfield]. He made an interesting point and said to me, ‘When you move to a club, naturally fans always expect you to be 100 per cent, regardless of what's going on in your actual day-to-day life’.

“For instance, in a normal job, if you've had a death in the family or your missus is pregnant or something like that, people accept that you might not have slept well the night before. In football, you cross that white line and you're expected to forget everything else and not have any emotions.

“I grew to understand that through speaking to Michael and you learn more in hardships than anything else.”

The relief was so clear when Sawyers scored his first Brentford goal on 21 October 2016 in a 2-0 west London derby win at QPR.

“I've never been one to go into games with the mindset of, ‘I want to score today’ or anything like that, but from the celebration, you can tell how much it meant,” he says.

“I don't think I've ever celebrated that much!

“The boys were happy for me and that spoke volumes of the squad we had. They knew I was getting a little bit of stick and they just supported me through it and carried on trusting and believing. There's nothing better than having people around you that do that.

“I needed that one and being against QPR made it a whole lot better!”

In the second season, Sawyers was settled.

“It just started becoming second nature. That first season in the Championship, I was thinking, ‘Should I be at this level? When it comes to second and third, you've been to that stadium before, you've played against these people.”

It was reflected in his numbers. In a comparative number of minutes across 2016/17 and 2017/18, his pass accuracy increased by 7.5 per cent, he had 300 more touches of the ball and created five more chances.

No surprise, then, that he was named Player’s Player of the Year for 2017/18. “It’s the best award you can win because it’s from the people you spent the most time with,” he adds.

Then came the Community Player of the Year award. “As an inner-city kid, that’s close to my heart. It's a half an hour or an hour out of your week to go and potentially make a kid's week or month. I remember that season as we did a deaf class and they taught me sign language. To this day, I can sign my name.”

Smith left for Aston Villa in October 2018 and Thomas Frank replaced him as head coach six days later. It was the first time Sawyers had not been led by him in over five years.

He chose not to see it as strange without Smith, but as a time to look back on the years they worked together.

Thankfully, there was already a rapport with Frank, owing to the Dane’s time as assistant head coach, and the bond soon grew stronger.

“I remember Thomas calling me into the office,” Sawyers recalls. “We would speak all the time, so he could have just been asking how I was or how training was, so I didn't know it was going to be for a specific reason, but he pulled me in and said he wanted to make me the captain of the team. At the time, I didn't really have much to say apart from thank you!

“I just knew I had to perform to the point where I couldn’t come off the pitch. Not that I am judgmental towards any captains, but a pet peeve of mine is when a captain has to get taken off and he’s the only player that has to take something off. I just never wanted to be the one having to take my armband off to give it to somebody else.

“I knew I'd have to be performing for 90 minutes. I had that metric in my head already, but with this extra responsibility, I had to lead with my performance, with my voice and most definitely I was not giving away something that somebody entrusted me with.

“I think it took me to another level and gave me an extra purpose. Not to say that I was unmotivated, my performances will show that I wasn't, but just that extra little bit of self-inflicted pressure definitely elevated me.”

As had been the case during his time at Walsall, at the end of three seasons at Brentford, they had not reached the play-offs. There was a 16-point gap to bridge the first year, six in the second and 10 in the third.

“When you think about the squads I played with at Brentford, it's almost criminal that we didn’t go up,” Sawyers adds.

“Not disrespect at all to the team that went up, but I feel like my teams were as good as that team.

“So many of us went on after that to go and play in the Premier League and I wonder sometimes, why didn't we all do this together?

“When Sheffield United, Norwich, Aston Villa, Newcastle come down, they have to get back up, but because Brentford have always been on an upward trajectory, there was never that pressure to have to get there.

“We went out to win games and we went out to be difficult, but we wanted to play the Brentford way. If we were aligning with our philosophy, it wasn't that necessarily like, ‘You have to win this game’, but we were big on performances.

“Naturally, if you perform well, you win games, but sometimes football is unforgiving, so you can perform well and lose, but we probably didn't have the ones where we performed bad and won.”

West Brom had shown interest in Sawyers in the summer of 2018, when Darren Moore was in charge, but a move had not materialised.

When the Baggies came calling again a year later, he could not say no. On 27 July 2019, he signed a three-year deal to return to the Hawthorns.

“Honestly, I don’t think any other club would have got me to leave Brentford,” Sawyers reflects.

“When I left to go to Walsall, it was always in the back of my head that I’d played for every age group possible apart from the first team at West Brom.

“My friends are quite passionate about my career and when I was at Walsall, the group chat would always be saying, ‘Just pretend you’re on loan still’. At first, it was a loan from the Championship, then a loan from the Premier League. That was just motivation to try and get to the next level.

“I always used to say to my agent I really wanted a move to West Brom, but they were always in the Premier League, so the minute they got relegated, it made my dream a bit more realistic.”

It was not solely a footballing decision to move, though.

“It was very difficult to leave, but my daughter was living in Birmingham and that probably tipped it over the edge. It was only on days off or weekends she would come down, and I wanted to be a more present dad.

“I was torn between heart with football and heart with family. I didn’t want the fans to think I was jumping ship for ambition or West Brom had a better chance of promotion. It was more off the pitch reasons.

“Obviously West Brom are a huge club and I wanted to play for every age group, but my favourite period in my career was my time at Brentford. I had a slow start, but it was only good from there.”