Match Review: West Ham United 3-3 Brighton, 02/02/20

From hope to despair to anger to laughter to bafflement to joy to relief – all in the space of 90 crazy minutes. The 3-3 draw between West Ham United and Brighton was an absolute roller-coaster of emotions and everything that being a football fan should be about.

Which other sport can have you lurch from feeling one way at 4.15pm to the polar opposite at 4.45pm? None, and that is why football is the most popular game on planet Earth.

Once Brighton had completed their comeback – with a lot of help from West Ham’s comedy-fending it must be said – there were a lot of people on Twitter saying that those Albion fans who had written the team off when we fell 3-1 behind must be feeling very silly.

Not really, no. The beauty of football is being proven wrong. That might be hard for some people to grasp in an era where changing your mind isn’t allowed.

It seems that in 2020 Britain, you have to doggedly stick to your original position no matter what (see both sides of the Brexit debate). But football is at its best when it completely dismantles an opinion.

As one sensible Albion fan put on Twitter: “Fans are entitled to be negative and angry one minute and then happy and positive the next. That’s what football does to people #bhafc #emotions.”

Fans are entitled to be negative and angry one minute and then happy and positive the next. That’s what football does to people #bhafc #emotions

— Richard Whittington (@Whittington1971) February 1, 2020

99% of supporters at the London Stadium and watching at home questioned Graham Potter’s sanity when, chasing a two goal deficit against a relegation rival, he brought on a right back who looked like a cart horse in his last outing and a left winger who hasn’t had a good game since August .

And we all got it wrong. When Ezequiel Schelotto and Solly March entered proceedings with the score West Ham 3-1 Brighton, we tweeted: “3-1 down and we’re bringing on Schelotto. There are no words.”

Within seven minutes, the score was West Ham 3-3 Brighton. We might even have won it had Fabianski not managed to push March’s late free kick around the post. Talk about an impact from the bench.

That’s why Potter is a highly paid football manager and we spent Saturday putting away eight pints of San Miguel and tweeting about relegation.

Potter himself gets things wrong, too. Particularly when it comes to Glenn Murray. Before the West Ham game, it had been five long months since Murray started a Premier League game.

He played for only 540 minutes in a December in which we saw a lot of squad rotation. Then in must-win games against Aston Villa and Bournemouth, he was afforded just nine minutes of action out of 180.

For a side struggling to find the back of the net, not utilising a proven Premier League marksman seemed mad. Potter finally gave Murray a chance at the London Stadium and lo and behold, he delivered a goal and a performance which saw him scored as our WeAreBrighton.com Star Player.

It was Murray’s goals which kept us up in the 2017-18 season. It was Murray’s goals that kept us up in the 2018-19 season.

And if Potter has finally come to value the experience, leadership and ability to put the ball in the back of the net that Murray can bring to the party, it will be his goals that keep us up in the 2019-20 season. Hopefully.

Because we’re still in a relegation battle, make no mistake about that. Under normal circumstances, a 3-3 draw against a bottom three rival shouldn’t be a cause for too much celebration; but the manner in which we came from behind to snatch a point feels big for a couple of reasons.

The first half performance had been ghastly. Most concerning of all was that the players didn’t look like they cared. Chris Hughton got us to safety last year by scraping 1-0 wins and 0-0 draws.

This current Albion side can’t keep a clean sheet and before Saturday’s second half, missed more chances than Katie Price has had husbands.

You don’t stay up if you don’t have fight in you or want to battle. The Albion didn’t have that in the first half. But in the second half, they rediscovered it.

Coming back from 3-1 down should do wonders for the players’ confidence ahead of another big six pointer against Watford next Saturday, who themselves threw away a two goal lead to lose 3-2 against Everton.

It also hammers a pretty bloody big nail into our hosts’ coffin. Imagine if the boot was on the other foot and we’d thrown away a two goal lead at home to an out-of-form relegation rival by gifting them two goals?

It would ruin the players for weeks and we’d look nailed on for relegation. West Ham only drawing 3-3 with Brighton from the position they were in on 70 minutes will have done serious damage to the morale and belief of the Hammers’ squad. Their next two fixtures against Manchester City and Liverpool probably aren’t going to provide much of a boost.

It was all going so well for David Moyes too. Brighton made their customary good start without taking any of the chances they created.

Aaron Mooy missed an easy header inside the first 60 seconds. Leandro Trossard fluffed a one-on-one after one of the best passes you’ll ever see from Davy Propper sent the little Belgian scampering in on Lukasz Fabianski. Murray was also off target with a couple of half chances.

Brighton then gave away their customary goal from a set piece. Maty Ryan doesn’t often leave his line to come and claim balls outside of his six yard box and we saw why that’s a very good thing as he looked more troubled than a resident of Wuhan who’s just started coughing.

Robert Snodgrass swung over a free kick and with Ryan advancing into the huge space between him and the defensive line, Issa Diop was left completely unmarked to stab the ball into the empty goal having run between Adam Webster and Martin Montoya.

Montoya wasn’t having a good afternoon of it – suddenly, the £4m spent on Chelsea’s promising young right back Tariq Lamptey looks like it could be an even shrewder investment – and he was at fault for West Ham’s second too.

Ryan Fredericks delivered a cross from the right which Montoya should have cleared. The Spanish full back only succeeded in heading the ball directly up in the air and with the rest of the Albion’s defenders quite content to watch it rise and then drop in the box, Snodgrass was on hand to smash a volley past Ryan via a wicked deflection. No prizes for guessing it was Webster who got the final touch.

Shocking defending coupled with missing easy chances. We’d been here before. Luckily, West Ham took pity on the Albion’s plight and so gifted us our first of the afternoon early in the second half when Fabianski punched the ball straight into the face of a startled Angelo Ogbonna for an own goal.

The deficit was back at one for only 10 minutes as more shocking defending from a set piece gave West Ham their third. Aaron Cresswell’s corner was headed clear by Murray but only as far as the edge of the box.

Aaron Mooy made a half-arsed effort to get to the loose ball as it made its way to Snodgrass. This time, the West Ham playmaker was 25 yards out but he again beat Ryan with another deflected volley, Bernardo heading the ball in the opposite direction to which it had initially been travelling.

Potter’s double substitution arrived with 18 minutes remaining. Just three minutes later and West Ham gifted us a second. An attempted clearance from Arthur Masuaku hit Trossard and flew into the box.

Either Ogbonna or Diop could have easily dealt with, instead they did a passable impression of the Chuckle Brothers and left it to each other.

By the time Diop tried to head it back to Fabianski with the ball no more than a yard off the ground, Pascal Gross had arrived on the scene to nudge it past the West Ham goalkeeper. Gross was wiped out and began appealing for a penalty but it wasn’t required as the ball trickled over the line.

Brighton now had two goals thanks to some Colin Hawkins-esque defending from their hosts. There aren’t many Premier League teams who hand chances like that on a plate to opponents, but sometimes it’s lucky moments such as those which can turn a season around.

It certainly turned this game around. Brighton now had all the momentum, West Ham were at sea and within 120 seconds, the Hammers’ nemesis Murray struck his customary goal against them.

Propper and March linked up down the right with the former delivering the sort of cross which is Murray’s bread and butter. Murray brought it under control at the back post and fired home low and hard past Fabianski.

There was a lengthy VAR check for handball but Murray’s celebration told its own story. He knew it had hit him in the side, even if none of his teammates initially joined in for fear of the goal being chalked off.

Eventually, the video ref decided that Murray’s 111th goal in Brighton colours could count. In the process, Murray joined a very select club of players to have scored in three different decades for the Albion and on the 12th anniversary of his home debut double against Crewe Alexandra. What a man.

Most of the praise and headlines went to Murray following West Ham 3-3 Brighton and rightly so; you write Murray off at your peril, as many Brighton fans and perhaps even Potter himself have done this season.

But a special mention should go to Potter too. He lost his father to a short battle with cancer on Thursday having also seen his mother pass away in the summer.

To loose one parent is devastating enough, to loose two in six months absolutely heartbreaking. It’s a measure of the man that not only was he was in the dugout at the London Stadium, but he had the wherewithal to make substitutions to change the game despite the tragedy he’d been through in the previous 48 hours.

You could see what it meant to Potter at the final whistle as he saluted the away end with his head bowed. A big point and the end of an emotional few days. Let’s hope that this 3-3 draw at West Ham is the result that turns the 2019-20 season around for Brighton.