Match Review: Brighton 0-5 Manchester City

Manchester City may have shown what an outstanding football team they are by beating Brighton 0-5 at the Amex, but there are still certain things you can do to at least give City a game – as the nine Premier League sides who have beaten them this season have shown.

Point one. Play your strongest team. If you want to have any chance of success against City, you cannot name a line up which features your two second choice full backs, for example.

City might name a weakened team, but because they have spent the GDP of an actual country assembling their squad, their reserves are still better than most Premier League sides’ first choice players.

Point two. Use height in attack. City have had a bit of a weakness defensively to height in attack and crosses into the box. Brighton should know this better than most, given that we have managed two Premier League goals against them and both came from headers – Leonardo Ulloa at the Etihad Stadium in May 2018 and Glenn Murray at the Amex a year later.

What you do not do is play a 5’4 centre forward like Aaron Connolly as a lone striker, who then does not manage a meaningful touch in the City box. Especially just 10 days after you tried the same master plan against Manchester United and it was a dismal failure then as well.

Point three. Defend well. City will always have a lot of the ball and their attacking players are deadlier than Harold Shipman when confronted with a new elderly patient signing up for his surgery. You have to defend well.

You cannot let Gabriel Jesus wander behind you to score a tap in from a corner (see Bernardo). You cannot spill routine shots (see Maty Ryan). You cannot give Raheem Sterling time and space to score a hat-trick (see every defender bar Lewis Dunk), a haul which made him the first opposition player to score a treble at the Amex.

Brighton had not conceded a hat-trick to an opponent since since Carl Baker when Stockport County won 4-2 at Withdean in August 2009; the wonderful afternoon when Tommy Elphick was sent off, Colin Hawkins came on in a tactical reshuffle and then got red carded himself within 90 seconds. The glory days.

Point four. Look after the ball. As already noted, you won’t have much possession against City. When you do have the ball, you therefore have to look after it wisely.

Was Davy Pröpper on drugs? I know someone who played six-a-side on meow meow once and even he had a vague idea of what team he was playing for and which way he was meant to be kicking.

Manchester City are packed with world class individuals, they deservedly won 0-5 and yet it was somehow Brighton midfielder Pröpper who was their best player.

He had what felt like a 90% pass completion rate to those playing in black. It wouldn’t be a surprise to lean that he mistakenly got on the City bus after the game rather into his own car given how pivotal he was to the Citizens’ success.

Point five. Don’t give away ridiculous goals. A team could manage to complete all of the above, but give City a sniff of goal through Chuckle Brothers-style defending and it will all be in vein.

See the fifth goal that Brighton conceded, which was ridiculous in the extreme. Alexa, play the Benny Hill Theme Tune…

Adam Webster accidentally heads it backwards; he and Sterling tumble to the ground; the ball hits Sterling’s head and goes through Ryan’s legs; it trickles towards goal where Dan Burn arrives to smash it against his own post and in.

A basic, five point plan if you like for at least making things difficult against City. Graham Potter and his players did the opposite of literally everything and that is ultimately why the final score was Brighton 0-5 Manchester City. The one positive was that Plucky Little Bournemouth no longer hold the outright record for biggest away win at the Amex.

The writing should have been on the wall from the moment that the teams were announced. Five changes from the side who on Wednesday night had pushed Liverpool close in a 3-1 defeat.

Potter was clearly prioritising the midweek trip to Southampton as the game to pick up the points which could mathematically guarantee Brighton another season of Premier League football.

The real question was if he was deliberately going to concede the fixture against City, why not go further in playing a second string side? What was the point in using Connolly as a lone striker when we already know that doesn’t work?

I watched Brighton 0-5 Manchester City with my mother, an Albion fan of over 50 years. She is not the most tactically astute of supporters yet even she wondered why the Irish forward was playing up top on his own. She also tried to claim that Leandro Trossard looked like Leonardo Di Caprio, which we will leave at that.

If Potter wants to play a lone striker, why not Murray? The veteran can hold the ball up and get on the end of crosses. It would also save the brittle confidence of 20-year-old Connolly from eroding further as he endured another testing game, stretching his scoreless run to 19 games and nine months. There are women in the world who have met a bloke, conceived and given birth since Connolly last netted.

Murray has played eight minutes out of a possible 640 since the restart. Has he accidentally killed Graham Potter’s cat? At least Alireza Jahanbakhsh was given a token 20 minutes against City, but he is another who could have been given a chance from the start if Potter had no interest in the game itself.

When it was announced that five substitutes would be allowed post-lockdown, a lot of Albion fans seemed to think it was a great thing because of our apparent squad depth.

What the 0-5 defeat to Manchester City showed is that Potter doesn’t rate certain players in this Brighton squad quite as highly as supporters. He won’t even give them significant game time in a fixture which he is willing to sacrifice to target a win elsewhere.

Murray and Jahanbakhsh are evidence of that. Bernardo has started just seven league games all season and those were largely due to Burn’s shoulder injury at the turn of the year. He is another who Potter does not seem to believe in, possibly even less so after the City defeat.

Potter rarely criticises Brighton in public, yet he took the step of using his post-match press conference to say the second goal that Albion conceded in losing 0-5 to Manchester City – the one Bernardo was responsible for – was unacceptable. It would be a surprise if we saw the Brazilian start again this season if Potter was moved to comment on such specifics.

That lack of squad depth is translating most worryingly into a drop-off in the performances of Ryan. With Dale Stephens not involved from the start against City, Ryan was the man who temporarily took over the reigns of Brighton scapegoat.

Yes, he should have done better with the fourth goal, losing a routine catch to present Bernardo Silva with a tap in. But the others?

The fifth was a calamity from all concerned and trying to lay the blame at Ryan’s hands for the first goal was straw clutching at the extreme. No Brighton player got close to Sterling, Ryan can’t have expected a snap shot from that range and when it did come in it was through a crowd of players and into the bottom corner.

Calls for Ryan to be replaced are completely over-the-top. According to the excellent Albion Analytics Twitter feed, his post-shot xG show that he has prevented six additional goals this season. In a relegation battle, that is crucial.

It may have been a testing evening for Ryan, but all goalkeepers endure games like that every now and again. We have just been lucky that Ryan does so rarely, which means that when they do happen, they become all the more obvious.

What Ryan does need though is genuine competition for the number one shirt. Where is his motivation coming from when he knows that David Button and Jason Steele are a couple of levels below him at least? Ryan’s best season as a Brighton player was the 2017-18 campaign when he had Tim Krul breathing down his neck. No coincidence.

It seems mad to sit here and think that a 0-5 defeat to a Manchester City side – who remain one of the greatest teams ever to play English league football – should be the catalyst for a serious summer look at the competitiveness of Potter’s Brighton squad.

The difference in performances between the Liverpool and Manchester City games show it is necessary, however. Brighton’s first string can give the Redmen a bit of a fright.

Potter makes five changes and three days later, Brighton are blown away in a game which, lets face it, could have finished seven or eight to City. They hit the frame of the goal twice for starters.

A defeat to City is to be expected. What made this different was the manner of it, the mistakes made and the general feeling that, no matter how good City are, Brighton performed like League One players in the second half because they couldn’t be bothered.

Naming deliberately weak teams to target another game is a risky business, especially if you don’t then go and win the game you’ve put all your eggs in the basket of. Suddenly, Southampton on Thursday night looks much more important.

Win at St Mary’s and this hammering will be quickly forgotten or turned into the sort of game we can all look back at and laugh upon. Lose to the Saints – who lest we forget beat City themselves the previous weekend – and the meltdown could be spectacular.