From studying pandemics to help deal with Covid outbreak to learning youth squad management through east African runners... how Brentford's odd couple of co-directors Phil Giles and Rasmus Ankersen have taken the Bees to the big time of the Premier League

For a brief moment, the shoe swaps feet and one of English football’s most shrewd recruiters begins to flick through his own CV.

‘I’m not a lawyer, an accountant, I haven’t got any football qualifications, I’m not a medical person... nothing,’ begins Phil Giles, Brentford’s co-director of football. ‘The one qualification I did have, though, turned out to be useful. Against all the odds.’

The other half of this odd couple, who have overseen an astonishing rise to the Premier League, laughs before taking up the tale.

‘When Covid first broke out, we didn’t know what to make of it,’ Rasmus Ankersen says.