Match Review: Burnley 1-0 Brighton
If you don’t end up managing to force an opposition goalkeeper into a save until the 93rd minute, then chances are you won’t win a game of football no matter how much possession you have or how well your manager says you played.
Brighton learnt that the hard way at Turf Moor. For all Chris Hughton’s claims in his post match interview that the Albion were the better side and had the better chances, we still lost the game. Despite having nearly 70% of possession in the second half, we still lost the game.
Joe Hart’s only save was the most routine of stops he’ll probably have this season, a comfortable collection of a Glenn Murray header three minutes into second half injury time. The Burnley goalkeeper could’ve filmed a decades worth of Head and Shoulders advertisements throughout the 90 minutes, he was that underemployed.
After the drama of last week’s 2-1 over 10 man Huddersfield Town and then the 3-1 victory over Crystal Palace, this was very much a case of after the Lord Mayor’s Show. Perhaps understandably given the exploits of the past week, Brighton looked like they’d left everything out there in their past two outings. The Seagulls were toothless, a shadow of the side that picked up six points in the space of three days.
Florin Andone never really got into things, Davy Propper and Yves Bissouma weren’t able to control the game in the same way they had against Palace in particular and Pascal Gross struggled to create the sort of chances that his normal high standards yield.
Maty Ryan was probably Brighton’s best player which tells you everything. The Australian number one denied former Seagull Chris Wood and then Robbie Brady with two fine stops in the first half and Lewis Dunk made a brilliant slide tackle to deny his 2010-11 League One title winning team mate Ashley Barnes from scoring in the second half. The Clarets certainly had the better opportunities despite what Hughton tried to claim afterwards.
It was the man who Dunk has replaced in the England squad who got the only goal of the game and a fortunate one it was too. Jack Cork’s shot didn’t look like it would cause much bother until it smacked James Tarkowski in the chest to deflect the ball past Ryan and the covering Bernardo.
Brighton’s best chance to salvage a point and deny Burnley a first win since September fell to Jurgen Locadia and needless to say, he missed. It was a simple one as well, a free header from six yards out which he somehow contrived to not even get on target, instead heading over the bar with the goal gaping.
It was the sort of miss that was inexcusable when Craig Davies was doing it on a weekly basis at the bottom of League One, yet alone a £16m club record signing in the top division of English football.
Some Brighton fans remarkably believe Locadia could still come good and that we should all be getting behind him, but the facts are that in the past year he has managed one goal against a League Two side in the FA Cup and a tap in against a Swansea City team who had fallen apart by the time he’d be introduced from the bench.
He’s picking up somewhere in the region of £45,000 a week, cost more than the Albion’s combined total spend in the first 110 years of the club’s history and yet he can’t even head a ball on target from six yards out. Unfortunately for those paying his wages, he seems more bothered about releasing new albums of shit music than putting in extra time on the training ground to improve his finishing.
Had Andone or Murray been on the end of that chance, you suspect Hart would have at least had to make a save. Even Aaron Connolly or Viktor Gyorkes, who both travelled again but weren’t named on the bench, would probably have done better.
In fact, you could probably make a case that most of the couple of hundred Albion fans who braved the trip in the TARDIS back to the 19th century on Saturday would have made more of the opportunity. And with a ridiculous run of four games against the current top six coming up, let’s hope that missing the chance to take a point against a struggling Burnley side doesn’t come back to bite us.
