A trip to Russell Martin’s hometown of Brighton to take on the Seagulls at the Amex. There was a time a few years ago when Brighton Chairman Tony Bloom held up Saints as the club that Brighton aspired to be - how times change. The timing of this was around 2016, before our club was bought by Chairman Gao, who subsequently allowed it to rot for four years, which has led us largely to where we are today, desperately swimming against the tide and trying to survive in the Premier League and so far, not making a very good job of it.
Brighton on the other hand have continued to buck the trend and confounded the
naysayers, including myself, by continually replacing players and replacing
managers and always seeming to get stronger. Chris Hughton did a good job then
Graham Potter came in and improved on it, then Robert de Zerbi came in and
improved on it again and now they’ve passed over to Fabian Hurzeler, who at the
ridiculously young age of 31, has made a very good start to life in the Premier
League. The same thing has happened with players, with the likes of Moises Caicedo
and Alexis Mac Allister moving onto the bigger clubs for huge amounts of money,
but replacements being found and seamlessly embedding themselves in the
Brighton team. Which South Coast team aspires to be the other one now?
We arrive of course in absolutely desperate need of some points and Russell
Martin himself has to be right on the edge now. Personally I feel that it will
take any sort of sign of the players are not playing for him, for him to lose
his job. He has some decisions to make
today around formations and replacements from the Liverpool game. Hopefully Tall
Paul will have recovered but there’s no way Adam Lallana will be fit to play
against his former club. Will we continue with Flynn Downs in the back three
and will we can continue with Wee Man as one of the full backs?
Brighton will be expecting to win this game easily because they go up to 2nd in
the league, even with a point. As everyone knows however, most Brighton fans
are Arsenal and Spurs fans and Brighton are their second favourite team. It’ll
be interesting to see if a sense of entitlement is there from the Seagulls
fans.
Team news drops and it’s another strange starting lineup, starting with Mr.
Vibes, Joe Lumley being in goal. The story was that Alex McCarthy was playing
through injury to start against Liverpool and probably as a reaction from that
game, or possibly because of the two crap goals he played a part in, we are now
down to our fourth-choice keeper. Yuki
Sugawara comes back into the team at full-back and it looks like KWP is being
deployed as a central defender with both he and Ryan Manning starting the game.
Tall Paul has not recovered from the Liverpool game and so Cameron Archer comes
back into the team.
Saints make a bright enough start and win a corner on the right, which is swung
in by Manning, headed clear and Fernandes shot is blocked which sets up a
Brighton break. One long pass forward towards Mitoma which should be cut out
easily by Sugawara but as he has done a couple of times this season, he seems
totally unaware of where the opposition player is and gifted the ball to the
Brighton forward with Lumley was in no man’s land. Mitoma decided to take the shot
early and put it wide. Fortunate.
Georginio Rutter is next to have a go, having jinked across the top of the box
to work the ball onto his left foot, the man who did absolutely fuck all in
three games against us for Leeds last season, puts his effort just wide. Having
shown us what he wanted to do, we let him do it again and Rutter has another go
from the next attack as he once again puts it onto his left foot and it sets
off for the far post, past the dive of Lumley and hits the post and away. We
are very fortunate to still be level.
Flynn Downes gets deservedly booked for bringing down Welbeck, thus earning
himself a suspension for the next game, and Welbeck nearly exacts his revenge a
couple of minutes later as Mitoma puts a cross over, which the former England
man meets well and guides a header past the flat footed Lumley but also past
the post.
It seems inevitable that Brighton are going to score in a minute and sure
enough it comes as O’Riley, who we were of course heavily linked with the
summer, takes a quick free kick to Lamptey and the vertically challenged
fullback who makes Ryan Fraser look big, puts in a cross from the right which
floats over Stephens is allowed to bounce in the box and Sugawara has once
again dozed off and Mitoma comes in and meets it with his head and gives Lumley
no chance at all. Shit defending.
Saints show a little bit of life after the goal and as we approach half-time,
Sugawara shows that he’s a much better attacking player than he is a defender
by being the free man at the end of a flowing move up the right and his low cross
really should be buried by Cameron Archer but he shins it over the bar from
about 6 yards. You don’t need anyone to tell you that we really need to be
taking those sort of chances.
Half-time And honest, that’s been pretty shit and we are going to have to be a
lot better in the second half. The
forwards have barely been involved and we are not looking like we have a goal
in us. We have to come out stronger in
the second half as one more Brighton goal and that will be that.
However, the second half doesn’t start great as Mitoma runs at THB, who blocks
him off and gets booked and is therefore suspended for the next game. In comes
the free kick out, headed out and O’Riley’s effort is easily saved by Lumley.
The one thing that Lumley does bring is a sense of calmness with the ball at
his feet and he starts to move which sees Fernandes finding Dibling, who has
come off the right wing. His ball low into Armstrong‘s feet sees him turn and
smash the ball at the defender behind him as per usual, but it rebounds left
and Manning picks it up and finds Armstrong again who this time takes too many
touches and sees his shot blocked but it bounces back out to Flynn downs on the
penalty spot and he smashes it into the net. Fucking get in.
It's a beautiful moment as Downes has been getting away with a few challenges,
much of the annoyance of the Arsenal and Spurs fans in the Brighton end, and
the Brighton manager seems to be getting very very pissy with it and it’s not
long before he is withdrawn and replaced with Aribo and at Sugawara is replaced
with Wee Man, before he can do something else disastrous defensively.
Dibling battles for the ball on the right and goes past three players before
setting out across the pitch and finding Wee Man on the left. Wee Man goes for it and his low cross is
missed by Armstrong and Cameron Archer meets it at the back post and rams it
into the net. Get the fuck in there…. Oh do fuck off…after the ball hits the
net, the flag goes up and so we are off to fucking VAR again.
Hi there Jarrad, it’s Robert Jones at
Brighton
G’day mate, I knew it was you as there’s
only one game on a Friday
On field decision is offside against
Archer
[Time goes by, civilizations rise and
fall]
G’day mate, he’s not offside, verdict is
green, you can give the goal
Yeah, about that Jarrad and you know…. ‘the
directive’
What… the directive brought in after
Saints got shafted at Wolves?
Yeah, find any reason possible to back up
the on field decision, especially if it’s a disallowed goal, even if it's fuck all to do with the actual on field decision... so we can a) show
these match going fans that we control their happiness and b) so we don’t look
shit.
OK, well Armstrong is offside but he hasn’t
touched the ball
Oh, we can’t disallow it for that then
Well we could…
How?
Well, he’s kind of flicked a heel at it…
and you know, he may have back heeled it from behind him, over his own head and
into the top corner, whilst running at full pelt with a defender up his arse
And the goalkeeper will have been impacted
by that, wouldn’t he Jarrad?
Err yeah, definitely would have reacted to that threat and otherwise, could
have claimed the ball from his position of fifteen yards away from it. You can tell all that by the way he didn't react at all.
Disallowed then.
What an absolute load of shit.
With us all fully expecting someone to fuck it up and give the game away now,
Joe Lumley makes his first shite pass of the game straight to a Brighton player
and then when it eventually comes back into the box, Rutter tries an acrobatic
volley which hits a defender and goes wide for a corner, which leads to header
by Dunk which is comfortably over the bar.
Joe Aribo has been a positive influence since he came onto the pitch and he
drives forward through the middle before finding Dibling on the right and with
defenders backing off because they are shit scared of him, he works onto his
left foot but can only fire it straight at Verbruggen.
With time running out we make a couple of joke substitutions with Armstrong and
Archer being removed for the new chuckle Brothers of Brereton Diaz and Sulemana.
Brighton still look the more likely with
Van Hecke bringing a comfortable save out of Lumley before Mitoma skins KWP and
his low cross is toed onto the outside of the post and wide by a combination of
a Brighton forward and THB. As time ticks
away another ball into our box sees Ayari throw himself to the ground under
challenge by Wee Man but he’s offside anyway, so he’s not gonna get that one.
There is one more chance for us as Fernandes does some brilliant work in
midfield to get free and plays a lovely ball over the top to Sulemana who is
already running towards goal but not looking where the ball is and it hits him
on the heel and bounces to safety. £25 million we paid for that. Fucking
useless. Straight from that Brighton go up the left and Dibling flies into a
tackle against Mitoma and picks up a yellow card, which means he will miss the
next game as well. Fucking hell. Not many Brighton fans saw that part of the game because a) they'd left and b) they all really support Spurs or Arsenal.
As the managers shake hands at the end, Fabian Hurzeler can’t resist being a
dickhead and makes a little comment which Russell Martin takes offence to and
it all gets a bit handbags. Oh look, a sense of entitlement. Prick. I didn’t really have an opinion on the new
Brighton manager before, other than being impressed by the start he’d made, but
now I think he’s a twat.
Meanwhile, oh goody, let’s talk about VAR again and how it is taking the joy
out of football and is a bag of inconsistent shite. The last game we played at
Brighton had a Theo Walcott goal disallowed for a toenail offside that couldn’t
be proven after five minutes of replays – that was the moment that killed VAR
for me and here we are today, back in Brighton.
Today we’ve had this goal from Cameron Archer ruled out. In order to
understand the context from a Saints point of view, you have to take into
account the goal that Arsenal got given against us at the Emirates earlier on
this season. I would have no problem with Archer’s goal being ruled out, if the
Arsenal goal a few weeks ago had also been ruled out and consistency had been
applied.
The Arsenal incident and today’s instant are virtually the same as in both
cases the cross comes in, an offside player in the middle misses the ball and
player at the back post scores. The only difference is that the ball went over
Merino in the Arsenal game and it went behind Adam Armstrong today. Arsenal got
given the goal against Saints, Saints had it disallowed. The official explanation that Armstrong‘s
movement impacted Verbruggen (the Brighton keeper) and his ability to claim the
ball, is absolute horseshit. The
explanation given to Russell Martin afterwards was that the on-field decision
carries weight in VAR investigations and so the Arsenal goal was given on-field,
whereas Saints goal was disallowed for offside against a player who wasn’t
offside, in Cam Archer. They spent three
minutes checking the on-field decision, which was that Archer was offside, and when
he wasn’t and the ‘weight’ argument is therefore null and void, they go off and
find something else to disallow it for which was nothing to do with the
on-field decision and tenuous at best. And another thing, the on-field decision
didn’t seem to carry any weight two weeks ago at Wolves, when our goal was
given and then ruled out for a collision that could have been interpreted
either way.
Basically, VAR is a massive inconsistent mess and is
completely subjective which is not the way it was supposed to work. Interfering
with play is a subjective call unless it’s a completely obvious ‘standing directly
in front of the goalkeeper’ type of thing but today, and with the Brighton game
two years ago, it seems that VAR are actively looking for a reason to disallow
our goal. All people want at the end of the day is consistency and that’s been
the case for years. If Arsenal goal stands against us, then our goal against
Brighton should stand also. VAR might solve some problems, but it creates a
whole load more. Get rid.
In the last three games we’ve had tonight’s effort, the penalty we didn’t get at
2-1 up against Liverpool, and the disallowed goal against Wolves and their second
goal being allowed. In order for us to prove the old cliche of it all evening
out over a season, we are going to be boiling some serious piss in the second
half of the season with all the VAR decisions that are going to go in our
favour and we might qualify for Europe. I suspect the theory of it all evening
out over the season is complete bollocks and we are some sort of cruel social
experiment to prove that.
Performance wise it was a classic game of two halves. We were pretty terrible
in the first half and the surprise was that we were only one behind, but in the
second half you could easily make the case that we were the better side,
playing with a lot more purpose and making this much vaunted and hyped Brighton
side look quite ordinary at times. The goal we scored through Flynn Downs was a
superb example of Russell Martin football working as we play forward and we
play positively and it all ended with Flynn Downes scoring from the edge of the
box. The identity of the goalscorer was particularly amusing as he was a little
bit fortunate to still be on the pitch…. But was he?
Referee Robert Jones was lenient all game regarding cards for fouls. However, for Downes, there was only one when
I thought he was in trouble as the others were nothing fouls with Brighton
players collapsing. Mitoma and Ayari
somehow committing six fouls each without getting booked so you can’t argue
that Downes deserved a second yellow on totting up. Downes not being sent off was a particular
piss boiler for Butt Hurzeler, who was waving imaginary cards about with every
challenge and I totally understand why Russell Martin got annoyed at it, as it’s
dick behaviour.
I have to praise Joe Lumley in goal who had a good game and had no chance with the goal that he conceded. Tyler Dibling had another ridiculously eye-catching game and we just have to enjoy him while he’s here. There is an outside chance he will be here next season if we stay up but absolutely none if as expected, we get relegated. Cameron Archer played well today other than the sitter he missed at the end of the first half and Ryan Fraser made a positive difference when he came on as a substitute. Maybe he’s the saviour after all.
One problem from today was the yellow cards picked up by THB, Dibling as well as Downes which means all three will miss the midweek game against Chelsea. Lesley Ugochukwu would normally come into the side in midfield but he won’t be eligible to play against his parent club. As with Joe Lumley today however, that will provide an opportunity for the likes of James Bree, Nathan Wood or Ronnie Edwards to come in and show what they can do. Maxwel Cornet and Kamaldeen Sulemana will also be nearer getting minutes on the pitch but don’t expect much there.
The bottom line is that this is a very good point away from home against an in-form team but we come away with the inevitable feeling of being robbed by the officials again. Next up a daunting visit from Chelsea, where we have virtually all our good players missing. Bring it on.
Up the Fucking Saints.
So Russell, Explain to Me Why the Brighton manager is a Dick?