Alireza Jahanbakhsh voted WeAreBrighton.com Player of the Month for January 2020
It’s amazing what a stunning goal – and a lot of votes from Iran – can do to a player. Alireza Jahanbakhsh has been voted as our WeAreBrighton.com Player of the Month for January 2020 with a landslide victory.
Jahanbakhsh scored 82.45% in a poll which became the second most participated WAB Player of the Month vote we’ve ever had. Only when the novelty of having Ryan Babel on the ballot paper for scoring for Fulham against Cardiff City in April 2019’s poll have we seen more people get involved.
To be fair to Jahanbakhsh, he might well have won without the influx of votes from his homeland after he scored one of the best goals we’ve ever seen a Brighton player net with his stunning overhead kick against Chelsea.
In a dire month in which the Albion picked up just two points from a possible 12 and exited the FA Cup at home to Championship side Sheffield Wednesday, that strike was one of the only bright spots.
It’s been quite the turnaround for an individual who hadn’t played a minute of Premier League football prior to December 28th. He’s netted twice since then, the other goal coming within five minutes of his first start under Graham Potter in the 2-0 win over Bournemouth.
Two swallows don’t make a shag as the ancient proverb says, and we do need to see more from Jahanbakhsh to be truly convinced that he’s turned a corner.
Fingers crossed for him though as you could see how much those two goals meant after 18 months of struggle. Continued success for Jahanbakhsh will also mean we can keep naming him in these polls, vastly increasing visitor numbers thanks to all our friends from Iran and getting more money through advertising as a result – which is what Paul Barber would call “maximising revenue streams”. Keep it up please, Alireza.
Behind Jahanbakhsh in second place came December’s Player of the Month Aaron Mooy. The midfielder scored Brighton’s goal in the dismal 3-1 defeat away at Bournemouth, but it was perhaps the game he missed through injury against Everton which most highlighted how important he is to the Albion’s cause.
Without Mooy at Goodison Park, Brighton gave their most toothless display of the season. Graham Potter wears possession statistics like a badge of honour, yet that afternoon on Merseyside was a rare occasion when we didn’t have more of the ball than our opponents.
Brighton tied Mooy down to a permanent deal in January – and a bargain one at that for a fee of just £5 million – and that looks like an incredibly shrewd bit of business.
If he carries on playing the way that he has so far in the 2019-20 season, bigger and better clubs that the Albion would surely have come sniffing Huddersfield Town’s way in the summer.
Maty Ryan continued his fine season with third spot, based largely we assume on his performance at Everton. Before the game, Ryan had pledged to donate $500 for every save made in the Premier League that weekend to the Australian Bushfire appeal.
He ended up making five brilliant stops himself, without which Brighton could have suffered an embarrassing hammering at the hands of the Toffees.
Ryan’s overall contribution to the Bushfire Fund ended up being an astonishing $55,000 – $28,000 for those saves in England’s top flight over the weekend of January 12th and another $27,000 for the 27 goals scored in the Australian A-League and W-League the previous week.
His generosity was easily the biggest contribution that any Brighton player made over the course of January; not that it’s saying much after a month that Potter and his players will be keen to move on from quickly.
Alireza Jahanbakhsh – 82.45%
Aaron Mooy – 6.38%
Maty Ryan – 6.74%
Bernardo – 2.77%
Glenn Murray – 1.77%
Steve Alzate – 0.96%
very nice player
alireza jahanbashsh