The closest Brentford fan to the action at Wembley was Mark Fuller, in fact he’s been in that position at every competitive Brentford game for the past 14 years as the club’s official photographer. Mark first started going to Griffin Park when he was 8 years old and his uncle collected him from home in Southall. Later in life as Mark developed an interest in photography, he started taking a camera to games. “At one time Brentford didn’t send a club photographer to away games so I used to give a few pictures to Peter Gilham who was editing the programme then. At the end of the 2006/07 season when we were relegated to League Two, the technology company I worked for was changing hands and I was able to take a pay off. It so happened that Brentford was changing its media requirements and I tendered to become the match day photographer and was lucky enough to win the tender. So, a large part of my pay off was used to buy more camera gear. I thought I would just do it for a couple of years. 14 years later I’m still doing it and even though it’s mainly match day only it’s the longest I’ve ever spent in one role. With other work I’m earning about a third of what I used to but money isn’t everything”.
Mark Fuller covers many B team games as well as all First Team games
The Play-Off final comes at the end of what Mark calls “a very strange, very weird season”. For example, COVID protocols meant he wasn’t able to travel to cover away games with colleagues in the club media team. That meant some long solitary car drives to and from matches. He wasn’t able to meet up with players at training, so couldn’t “remind them who I am and where they need to go when they score goals to make the best pictures”. During the actual games no fans in the stands “had a big impact on the way players celebrate after goals. They didn’t know where to go. At Griffin Park you knew where the players’ families were in the main stand and they tended to go that way, so I based myself that side. Jota was great for that, always went that way.”
Jota celebrates after scoring against QPR in April 2017
Mark says “it’s a hell of a lot easier to take decent football photographs when you are taking photographs of decent football” and he’s had plenty of that this season. But he admits that “the collective noun for photographers is a ‘moan’ of photographers. Rain is the worst thing. It doesn’t matter how good your waterproofs are, if the rain is consistent for the two hours you are out there it gets in somewhere. Water can run down your sleeves into your laptop when you are editing and wiring images too!
Mark Fuller (right) on a typically cold day in Hull in December 2018
“When it comes to cold, one game at Doncaster’s old Belle Vue stadium was the worst. Going into the press room after the game my hands were so cold I couldn’t use the camera. I was looking through the lens at Martin Allen giving his press conference and my fingers just wouldn’t work!”.
Floodlights are a favourite moan for photographers “because they are awful at most grounds. They are not bright enough or they flicker and that’s a problem even if you are using cameras that cost silly amounts of money. At one point at Griffin Park there were different colours in different parts of the pitch. However, the ones in the new stadium are pretty good.
Marcus Forss after scoring against Bournemouth
“It was great to have fans in for the play-off semi-finals – I had thought that the fans at the Vitality contributed a lot to the game but the fans at the Brentford Community Stadium were a different class, they lifted the atmosphere superbly – I’m really looking forward to having a capacity crowd in there soon”.
Mark says working at Wembley is always a stressful experience. “Last year before the game, for Covid screening they took heart rate as well as temperature and said ‘your heart rate is a bit too high’. I said it’s not surprising, I’ve just carted a load of camera equipment up a flight of stairs, it’s the play-off final and I’m Brentford, of course my heart rate is high! After the game an EFL official asked ‘do you want to come round and cover the trophy lift’. I said ‘no its OK, I’ll just sit here and have a little cry’.”
This year was different, Mark admits the experience was still stressful but “an early penalty settled the nerves. I was absolutely calm behind the goal when Ivan stepped up to take the penalty.When he scored he ran the correct way, straight pass me.That was superb.
“When Emiliano got the second he knew where I was, he came right past me and I got his trademark celebration.
“I then thought this is OK, I think we are going to do this. But about ten minutes from time I had a bit of an emotional wobble and one of my photographer colleagues put her arm around me and said ‘its alright, they are going to do it’. After that I was fine”.When the referee blew the final whistle Mark managed to capture Ivan Toney’s reaction. It’s one of Mark’s favourites.
Then began the ceremonials. It had been agreed that at full time the club photographer of the winning team would be given given a COVID red zone pass and a black bib .Mark explains: ‘this meant I was allowed on the pitch. Our media manager Chris Wickham turned up in front of me and passed the bib over. It was an unbelievable moment. The squad started kicking off with the champagne before the guys were ready with the pyrotechnics then there was the lifting of the cup, it was all a bit of a stramash. Then I had to drag Thomas and the cup over to the other photographers because they hadn’t got a picture of him with the cup.
I had two remote cameras with me and my own two normal cameras as well so I ended up with 5,000 frames to go through plus the ones taken by my colleague Paul Dennis. We don’t win the Play-Off final every season.”
You can see all of Mark’s work and that of his colleague Paul Dennis (who took this great picture) at https://officialbfcpics.co.uk/. Our thanks to both of them for all the help they give us and all the other Brentford fan groups.
