Brentford star Ivan Toney has ‘drive and determination’ to prove Newcastle wrong, says Thomas Frank

Getty Images
Malik Ouzia @MalikOuzia_22 December 2020

Brentford boss Thomas Frank believes star striker Ivan Toney is driven on by his Newcastle rejection as he prepares to face his former side in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup tonight.

Toney was signed by the Toon from Northampton Town in 2015, but spent most of his three-year spell at the club out on loan and was handed only two first-team appearances before being sold to Peterborough United.

His prolific form with the Posh earned the 24-year-old a £10million to west London this summer and he has hit the ground running, scoring 16 times in 20 appearances to lead the Championship scoring charts.  

The Bees are looking to reach the semi-finals of a major competition for the first time in the club’s history and Frank knows that Toney will have the extra motivation of wanting to show his former employers exactly what they missed out on when Steve Bruce’s side arrive at the Brentford Community Stadium this evening.

“I think Ivan has an inner drive and determination to reach the highest possible level,” the Dane said. “There’s always a situation in all of our careers that inspired us or is irritating us enough to make us work hard every day to try to prove some people wrong.

“I know that Ivan has big ambitions and of course he would like to prove that he could have played in the Premier League.”

The immediacy of Toney’s impact has been crucial to Frank’s side, who sold last season’s top scorer Ollie Watkins to Aston Villa in a £30million deal this summer.

Watkins was himself filling the goalscoring void left by Neal Maupay’s move to Brighton ten months earlier, but while Frank has little doubt that Toney will eventually follow his predecessors into the top-flight, he believes his roundabout journey has been crucial to his development.

“It’s not easy to just replace [Watkins],” Frank added. “Show me clubs that just replace a 25-goal striker with another one - we’ve done it, or nearly done it, two times in a row.”

“Ivan has done fantastic and he will play in the Premier League in the future, on way or another, I have no doubt about that. But maybe this way the route for him, the pathway he had to go through to get there. There are so many different pathways for players to go to the top.

“Some of them are Messi and Ronaldo but as far as I know there are only two of them in the world who had that pathway and for the rest it’s a lot of hard work. Some of them take all different kinds of pathways - lower league football, going abroad, coming back - and it’s so difficult.”

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in