Inflatables, flying condiments and fancy dress: Lewis Dunk makes his Brighton debut

Here are a couple of questions for you: Were you there on the day that Lewis Dunk made his Brighton debut? And did you think this young man would go onto become Albion captain in the Premier League, a full England international and one of the best players that the Seagulls have ever produced with 400 appearances for the club to his name?

The answer for 1,854 of us is yes to part one. There will probably be some Brighton fans who will try and claim it is a yes for part two as well, but truthfully Dunk’s debut came in a pointless game at the end of a pretty pointless season. Nobody really knew there and then just what a special talent we had on our hands.

Travel back in time to Saturday 1st May 2010 and ask the WeAreBrighton.com team what the most noteworthy part of Milton Keynes Dons 0-0 Brighton was and you would not get the answer “Lewis Dunk making his Brighton debut.”

More memorable than the fact it was Dunk’s debut was a pissed up Bananaman running around the stadium:mk away end with Scott Tracy from Thunderbirds.

There was the MK Dons stewards, who were on a mission to stop anybody having anything that could possibly be construed as fun by removing a sea of various inflatables from supporters.

That came following a call to arms on North Stand Chat for fans to defy the ban, leading to Albion supporters turning up with bananas, dolphins and even a raft of lilos.

Then there was a near brawl in the stands after some rogue ketchup, brown sauce and mustard went all over someone’s back during the first half.

After the game, an Albion fan nearly ended up in a canal outside a pub in nearby Fenny Stratford after taking the inadvisable decision to try and operate a lock.

Their luck would have been out if they had actually fallen in, as the MK Dons stewards had confiscated a potentially life saving rubber ring a few hours earlier as well.

We stole a tin of sardines for dinner on the way home despite the fact that nobody in their right mind likes sardines, put away a couple of £4.99 bottles of white wine and then had a typically rubbish night in West Street’s grottiest nightclub, Tru.

Perhaps most memorable of all was the out-of-order toilet on the train back from Milton Keynes. A busy carriage of packed Brighton fans continued to use it, filling it right up to the brim with piss as it could not be flushed.

An unknown individual then added a layer of sick to the top, after which the bowl became so full that it overflowed with a river of sick and piss leaking under the toilet door and under the carriage itself. Lovely stuff.

In case you haven’t worked it out yet, quite literally nothing of any note happened on the pitch. It seems strange to look back and think that the Albion debut of Lewis Dunk took place in such a meaningless fixture given everything that he has since gone onto achieve in his brilliant Brighton career.

MK Dons and the Albion were two sides comfortable in mid table. Both played weakened teams in the penultimate match of the season and it ended up being akin to watching paint dry.

Gus Poyet fielded Gavin Hoyte, Lee Hendrie, Sebastian Carole and Chris Holroyd as well as giving Dunk his debut. Ashley Barnes was an unused substitute purely so he did not score a fifth goal in eight games on loan and subsequently push Plymouth Argyle’s summer asking price up higher.

Up against our 18-year-old debutant future England international, MK Dons fielded their own teenage striker making his first team bow.

Charlie Collins was asked to play as a lone front runner, a thankless task which explains why neither Sexy Pete Brezovan nor his opposite number Stuart Searle had a serious save to make throughout the 90 minutes.

Collins’ career took on a slightly different trajectory to Dunk. He made just four appearances in the Football League and was last seen turning out for Metropolitan Police.

He did manage to hit the post at stadium:mk and former Manchester United winger Luke Chadwick rattled the bar but that was as good as it got. As the statisticians will tell you, neither counts as a shot on target.

Even referee Oliver Langford was bored enough to try and spice up proceedings. He dismissed MK Dons player-coach Alex Rae and the Albion’s Diego Arismendi for swinging handbags at each other as the half time whistle blew.

A couple of bookings would probably have sufficed but clearly Langford hoped that less players would result in less mind numbing boredom. That did not work; all Langford achieved was hastening the end of Arismendi’s Brighton career.

The on-loan Stoke City midfielder had arrived amid great fanfare from Seagulls supporters. Nobody had seen him play a game, so this excitement was seemingly based on nothing more than the fact that the Potters had forked out £1.5 million for him and he happened to be from South America.

This was a cautionary tale of getting over excited about a player based purely on his fee. Arismendi’s contribution in two months in a Brighton shirt totalled that red card, another red for headbutting somebody in a reserve game and a complaint about him blasting out loud music in the early hours of the morning from the house he was staying in. His girlfriend also left him to return to Uruguay.

In a match this pedestrian, it would have been hard for Lewis Dunk to look anything less than comfortable on his Brighton debut, which is exactly what Andy Naylor in The Argus described him as.

Most interestingly given the style of football that Poyet was trying to instil just six months into his reign was the fact that Dunk was extremely comfortable on the ball.

There were no sign of nerves; he was confident in stroking it around the back line and looked liked he had been playing alongside Tommy Elphick for years.

It was not hard to see why Poyet had offered the Albion’s youth team captain a professional contract on the Thursday and then given him his first team bow two days later. Dunk was very obviously one for the future and the type of player that Poyet wanted in his new-look Brighton.

The fact that Dunk’s debut came in Milton Keynes was not without irony itself as without the creation of MK Dons, he may never have become a Brighton player.

Up until the age of 10, Dunk had been on the books of Wimbledon. It was as a result of their move 62 miles north and the extra travelling it would entail for the 10-year-old that he left the Dons’ academy.

Martin Hinshelwood was quick to pounce and Dunk was soon signing for his home town club. The rest, as they say is history, even if not many of us realised at the time the history we were watching unfold at stadium:mk.