Made in Brighton: When homegrown Albion hammered Northwich 8-0
Dick Knight had a lot of weird and wonderful visions for Brighton & Hove Albion’s new stadium at Falmer. One favourite was that the walls of the concourses would be adorned by artwork painted by young supporters.
Another of his dreams was that the team that took to the pitch in the famous blue and white stripes would be made up entirely of homegrown players.
In a game awash with foreign imports, that seems incredibly naïve now. By the time that the Albion did eventually run out at the Amex in August 2011, Lewis Dunk was the only academy player involved.
Over half of Gus Poyet’s He Who Must Not Be Named’s starting XI who defeated Doncaster Rovers 2-1 on that most memorable of afternoons were born outside of England.
Back in the autumn of 2006 though, Knight’s ambition did seem quite so farfetched. In the 2005-06 season, Brighton’s Youth Team had embarked on a record-breaking run to the quarter finals of the FA Cup which included knocking an outstanding Chelsea side out of the competition.
Manager Dean Wilkins had subsequently replaced Mark McGhee as first team boss a month into the 2006-07 campaign.
Many of his young charges now made up the first team squad as the Albion tried to rebuild in League One following a dispiriting relegation as the Championship’s bottom club.
Results were mixed in Wilkins’ early weeks at the helm. He started off with a 1-0 win at Millwall, a 2-2 draw at home to Plucky Little Bournemouth and a 4-1 hammering of Leyton Orient.
There were then five defeats in a row followed by victories on the road at eventual champions Scunthorpe United, highly-fancied Huddersfield Town and Bradford City.
Young players and teams are renowned for being inconsistent and Wilkins’ Brighton were at the extreme end of that scale.
Nobody quite knew what to expect then when the FA Cup First Round draw paired the Albion with Northwich Victoria.
The Conference side represented a potential banana skin for Wilkins’ team, especially with Brighton having a long and proud tradition of elimination at the hands of opponents from a lower division.
Lincoln City, Hereford United, Sudbury Town, Fulham and Kingstonian had all pulled off shocks against the Albion in the previous 12 seasons. Then there was the fact that Brighton had not won a game in the competition for five years.
We need not have worried. Brighton not only saw off Northwich Victoria, but the final score of 8-0 was the Albion’s biggest win since hammering Southend United 9-1 at the Goldstone Ground in November 1965.
You had to go back to February 28th 1903 to find the last time a match finished 8-0 to the Seagulls when Southall were hammered in Southern League Division Two.
The 8-0 win over Northwich Victoria was therefore an historic day and one when Knight’s dream of a homegrown Brighton XI looked, if not realistic, then less ridiculous.
It also happens to be one of the most underrated afternoons of the Withdean era that should really be talked about much than it is; how many of us had seen Brighton score eight times in 90 minutes before that, and how many of us are ever likely to see it happen again?
Wilkins’ starting XI read Michel Kuipers in goal. A back four of Adam Hinshelwood, Joel Lynch, Guy Butters and Kerry Mayo.
Tommy Fraser, Adam El-Abd, Dean Hammond and Dean Cox made up the midfield and Jake Robinson partnered Alex Revell in attack. Only Kuipers, Butters and Revell were made away from Brighton.
The homegrown XI dream could have happened in the second half. Joe Gatting was introduced in place of Revell with 19 minutes remaining; if Sam Rents had come on for Butters rather than entering the fray for Robinson and John Sullivan taken over in goal from Kuipers, then Brighton would have finished the game with every player on the pitch having come through the club’s academy.
Seven of the eight goals were from Brighton-bred players. Cox got the party started after only eight minutes with a low curling effort into the far corner after a clever pass from Hammond.
10 minutes later and Robinson added the second when bursting through the middle and striking a 20 yard effort past Phil Senior in the Victoria goal.
Both of those first half Brighton goals were greeted by a lull in the Albion’s performance with Northwich enjoying short spells of dominance.
The visitors were still in the tie as they trotted off at half time, another statement which seems ludicrous given the carnage that was about to unfold after the break.
Wilkins eluded to this in his comments after the game. Ever the perfectionist, he said: “What worried me slightly was that at 2-0 we could possibly have conceded one. We had a spell of ten minutes where we were quite poor. From that moment onwards the quality of our play on the break was breath taking.”
Goal three came from Robinson galloping down the right, cutting inside and beating Senior with a cross-shot. That was on 55 minutes.
On 64, Revell spoiled things by being the only non-Albion produced player to get on the score sheet when he shuffled into space and beat Senior at his near post.
Robinson completed his hat-trick with goal number five on 78, another cracking drive which left the sprawling Senior with no chance.
It was Robinson’s second treble in the space of two weeks, having scored all three goals in the Albion’s win at Huddersfield and he departed to a standing ovation from the Withdean crowd of 4,487.
Gatting scored the sixth when following up an El-Abd shot (yes, really) which Senior had spilled. Gatting’s strike drew the biggest celebrations of the afternoon, seeing as it was his first senior goal coming nearly a year after his debut.
The player himself looked relieved to finally get the monkey off his back and every one of his team mates surged forward to celebrate bar Kuipers, who could not bring himself to travel the 90 metres down the pitch.
Northwich all but gave up at that point but Brighton were not about to go easy on them. Rents was an unlikely candidate to add the seventh, the left back popping up on the right-hand edge of the Northwich box to finish with aplomb just six minutes after he had been introduced from the bench.
Cox then rounded things off with goal number eight in stoppage time, a cheeky chip over Senior following some intricate passing play in the build up. Brighton 8-0 Northwich Victoria. You had to pinch yourself to make sure it was not a dream.
Not that Albion supporters were in dreamland for long. Remember what we said earlier about Wilkins’ side being ridiculously inconsistent?
Well, Brighton, followed up the 8-0 win over Northwich by losing 1-0 at home to Tranmere Rovers seven days later and 1-0 at Doncaster Rovers a week after that. Defeat at Belle Vue was particularly crushing given that Mark McCammon of all people scored the Doncaster winner.
The next round of the FA Cup paired Brighton with Stafford Rangers, who were vanquished with a far less impressive 2-0 win at Withdean to set up a clash away at Premier League West Ham United in round three. Prime Carlos Tevez against Kerry Mayo was quite the spectacle.
By that point, Wilkins was beginning to realise that his young players were perhaps not good enough to deliver Knight’s dream of a homegrown XI playing every week.
Between mid-December and mid-February, Brighton won only one league game and found themselves being dragged towards the League One relegation battle.
Wilkins become a more pragmatic manager as a result, supplementing his squad with older and more experienced professionals over the final 18 months of his reign.
When he was controversially replaced by Micky Adams in the summer of 2008, the idea of a Brighton-bred XI was effectively killed off.
Still, Knight and Wilkins will always have Brighton & Hove Albion 8-0 Northwich Victoria. It may not have taken place at a new stadium with concourses covered in paintings by children, but it was still a memorable afternoon for Sussex sport and the Albion academy. One that will almost certainly never happen again.
