Match Review: Bournemouth 2-0 Brighton
If Brighton and Hove Albion and Bournemouth are in the same division next season, can we just agree to give them the three points rather than bothering to go all the way to the Vitality Stadium for an inevitable defeat?
Because let’s face it, the Cherries are just one of those teams we never beat. It is now 11 games and over 11 years since the Albion last defeated Bournemouth.
Throw in the fact that Eddie Howe has suffered just one loss in 11 games against Brighton in his career and you have a combination that we just don’t seem to know what to do against.
For the first 20 minutes, it looked like there could be a good chance of a first three points against Bournemouth since Bas Savage was strutting around in blue and white.
Chris Hughton must have hit the Christmas sherry early as he abandoned his normal caution away from home, playing both Florin Andone and Jurgen Locadia in attack and replacing the more defence minded Dale Stephens with Yves Bissouma in the midfield engine room.
It nearly worked. The three new faces all had good opportunities to give the visitors the lead early on and it was only some inspired goalkeeping from Asmir Begovic that prevented them doing so.
The home goalkeeper denied Bissouma from point blank range after a lovely one-touch passing move that involved the midfielder and Pascal Gross before pushing Locadia’s effort from the edge of the box out for a corner and smothered Andone’s header which looked like it could cause chaos in the box. Against a lesser custodian than the Bosnian international, one of those goes in and it is a very different game indeed.
Maty Ryan, making his penultimate appearance before jetting off to represent Australia in the Asian Cup of Nations, didn’t have a thing to do until the 21st minute when he was picking the ball out of the back of the net after Bournemouth’s first shot on goal of the afternoon.
It came from David Brooks who picked the ball up in midfield and weaved his way to the edge of the box without any sort of meaningful tackle from a blue and white shirt which allowed him to strike a fine distance effort across Ryan and into the bottom corner for 1-0.
That goal completely derailed the positive start that the Albion had made to the match. Gone was the quick passing, the attacking intent and the will to get forward and in it’s place it was a return to the sort of garbage we’ve seen too often in the road in the Premier League as passes went astray, the defence were at sixes and sevens and nobody seemed to have a clue how to make anything happen.
Particularly affected was Locadia. He’d actually looked like a £14m striker in the opening exchanges but as soon as the Albion went behind, he was back to appearing as though he’d won a cornflake competition to be a professional footballer for a day. Clearly, there is some talent there but time must be running out now with the January transfer window so close to opening.
In truth, we never looked likely to get anything out of the game from the moment the ball left Brooks’ boot but any remaining hope was well and truly extinguished when Lewis Dunk picked up two yellow cards in the space of 12 second half minutes.
There seems to be an even divide when it comes to apportioning blame for what happened. Some Albion fans lay the fault straight at the feet of Mike Dean while others are exasperated by a stupid challenge from Dunk which he didn’t need to make.
The truth is somewhere between the two. Dunk should never have received the first yellow card as it was actually Bissouma who pulled back Brooks as he embarked on another run into the heart of the Albion defence.
Quite how a highly-paid professional referee can mistake the Sussex born-and-bred Brighton captain who he’d been dealing with all afternoon with a guy who grew up in Mali is anyone’s guess, but maybe if Dean concentrated more on what was going on on the pitch and less on making himself the centre of attention then he wouldn’t make such a blindingly obvious cock up.
There was no doubting that the second yellow was Dunk and was worthy of a card however. The England international gave the ball away in the first place and, clearly annoyed with that error, swiped down Callum Wilson out of frustration with a tackle that was never going to be legal.
It was a brain dead thing to do even if Dunk didn’t realise he was already on a booking, the sort of petulant moment we saw quite often earlier in his career but the sort of thing we’d hoped he’d grown out of over the last couple of years. Hopefully, it’s a one-off.
Hughton had clearly swapped the Christmas sherry for something stronger by this point, deciding that at 1-0 down the best route back into the game would be by throwing on Gaetan Bong. That was despite the fact that top scorer Glenn Murray, with his phenomenal record of scoring against his former clubs lest we forget, was kicking his heels on the bench.
Murray did get the final 10 minutes but by then it was game over as Brooks had already added his and Bournemouth’s second, running unchecked between Bong and Bernardo to meet a Ryan Fraser cross with a flicked header that sent the ball up and over the outstretched hand of Ryan.
That was the third and final effort on target Bournemouth managed all afternoon. They therefore scored with 66.6% of their attempts on goal, a ridiculous statistic that only adds to the feeling that the Cherries are just one of those teams we’re never going to beat.
Still, at least we don’t have to play them again for a while. A whole two weeks to be precise. Can’t wait for that FA Cup third round meeting along the A27.
