2019-20 Season Review: February
Brighton & Hove Albion faced four Premier League matches in February in what appeared to be a make-or-break month if the Seagulls were to avoid relegation come the end of the 2019-20 season.
Watford and Crystal Palace were both to visit the Amex with trips to West Ham United and Sheffield United squeezed in too. With a final 10 games which included fixtures against Wolverhampton Wanderers, Arsenal, Leicester City, Manchester United, Liverpool and Manchester City, the Albion needed points on the board before March arrived and they faced seven sides in the shake up for top six finishes.
February began at the London Stadium, a venue where entertainment always seems to flow when Brighton visit and the 2019-20 trip to East London was no different.
Graham Potter dropped a major surprise in his team selection, opting to start Glenn Murray for the first time since September. 11 days earlier it had appeared as through Murray’s Albion career was over when he spent a prolonged period on the pitch applauding supporters after the 3-1 defeat to Plucky Little Bournemouth.
Many took that as a goodbye. No club managed to make a successful move to acquire the veteran striker however, including Manchester United who emerged as a shock candidate for his signature.
And so Murray went from nearly joining United to leading the line for the Albion at West Ham. Brighton fans know that you write Murray off at your peril and he showed Potter that he still had something to offer when popping up with a late equaliser as the Albion recovered from being 3-1 behind to draw 3-3.
Another crushing defeat looked on the cards as the game entered its 70th minute with the hosts 3-1 ahead. The Hammers had gone 2-0 up thanks to a mistake from Maty Ryan which gave Issa Diop the opener and a mistake from Martin Montoya which gave Robert Snodgrass a second via a deflection off Adam Webster.
Brighton pulled one back thanks to a comical own goal when Lukasz Fabianski punched the ball straight into the face of a startled Angelo Ogbonna, whose skull sent it straight back past Fabianski and into the empty net.
The deficit was back at one for only 10 minutes as more shocking defending 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. The West Ham playmaker was 25 yards out but he beat Ryan with another deflected volley, Bernardo heading the ball in the opposite direction to which it had initially been travelling.
Potter then made a double change which initially looked like it had been dreamed up by a man taking one too many hallucinogenics. Here Brighton were, chasing a two goal deficit against a relegation rival and Potter was bringing on a right back who looked like a cart horse in his last outing and a left winger whose last good game came in August.
With wonderful foresight, we tweeted as Solly March and Ezequiel Schelotto joined the action: : “3-1 down and we’re bringing on Schelotto. There are no words.”
Seven minutes later and the scoreboard was transformed from West Ham 3-1 Brighton to West Ham 3-3 Brighton. There was more comedy-fending to go with West Ham’s earlier own goal as they gifted the Albion a second, an attempted header back to Fabianski from Diop with the ball a yard off the ground being so bad that even Pascal Gross had the pace to intercept it and slot home.
The momentum was all with Brighton now. Davy 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 to spark wild scenes of celebration from the packed away end.
There was a lengthy VAR check but Murray knew there was nothing wrong with it. He stood there, arms outstretched, soaking in the adulation from the Albion support as he had done on 110 previous occasions. Goal number 111 was as important as any that had gone before.
Murray had proven the doubters wrong and so too had Potter. After a January full of weird substitutions and tactical decisions, here he got things right.
The Brighton boss deserved a lot of credit for that, especially coming just 48 hours after he lost his father to a short battle with cancer.
As we filtered away from the London Stadium on a glorious February day, it felt like coming back to snatch a draw in such dramatic circumstances against one of the few sides below Brighton in the table was a turning point in the 2019-20 season.
Watford’s visit to the Amex presented a good chance to build on that result. Or so we thought. After 90 painful minutes, the Albion were lucky to escape with a 1-1 draw against the struggling Hornets.
The visitors took the lead inside of 20 minutes and again it was a disappointing goal to concede from a defensive point of view. A sloppy Mooy pass was picked up by Abdoulaye Doucoure, who was allowed to run unchallenged to the edge of the box before beating Ryan.
It took another ridiculous own goal to rescue Brighton a point. Alireza Jahanbakhsh delivered an innocuous low cross which Adrian Mariappa inexplicably slid past Ben Foster under absolutely no pressure.
Leandro Trossard missed a glorious chance to win it late on, but that would have been harsh on Watford. The draw left Brighton three points above the relegation zone. Three of the sides below had games in hand as the Albion headed off for some warm weather training during February’s first ever Premier League winter break.
Tenerife was the destination and it wasn’t just the Albion’s footballing skills that got a work out on the continent – several of the squad were filmed in a bar sucking on balloons, an act that was soon brought to the attention of the national media and resulted in something of a frenzy.
Brighton apparently could not believe the stir that the footage caused, which was incredibly naive given the headlines that Mesut Özil, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang, Alexandre Lacazette,Jack Grealish in and Kyle Walker to name but a few have generated in the past for sucking on balloons.
For a football club that has a clause in its season ticket terms and conditions which allows them to ban any supporters who besmirch the good name of Brighton & Hove Albion, the Seagulls were curiously lax when it was their own players doing the besmirching.
The big question once Brighton returned to Blighty was whether the visit abroad, drinking in nightclubs on what was meant to be a training trip and the magical power of balloons could spark a much-needed upturn in form?
Sheffield United away was the third match of February and in one of the most underrated moments of the 2019-20 season, Brighton fans rocked up at Bramall Lane with 2,000 blue balloons to release as the teams entered the pitch in honour of those Spanish antics.
The Albion made a slow start as they tried to work all those Mahous and Sangrias out of the systems. For the first 30 minutes, it was the Alamo. Blades fans were in full voice, a proper city centre ground full of proper football supporters roaring their side on.
Brighton managed to survive, conceding only once to Enda Stevens’ wonderful volley. United really should have been two or three ahead by that point and they paid for the fact they weren’t when Neal Maupay equalised just four minutes later.
Mooy sent over a free kick, Webster met it with a downwards header and Maupay managed to steal in before Dean Henderson could get there to steer the ball home. It finished Sheffield United 1-1 Brighton.
Maupay said afterwards that it was exactly the sort of game that Brighton would have lost a few weeks earlier, and he was right. Not only did the Albion appear to have rediscovered some fight, but Potter also adapted his approach for the trip to Yorkshire to deliver a pragmatic, Chris Hughton-esque defensive display in which the Albion recorded just 33% possession.
Central to the battle was the recall of Shane Duffy as Potter switched to a back five to combat the Blade’s physicality. Duffy was magnificent alongside Lewis Dunk and Webster whilst pairing Murray and Maupay together meant that Chris Wilder’s overlapping centre backs were too occupied to pop up in wide positions and deliver crosses.
The result and performance against Sheffield United was a timely one given the identity of Brighton & Hove Albion’s final February opponents – Crystal Palace at the Amex in the second derby day of the 2019-20 season.
In typical Brighton style, everything which had been good about the previous week went out the window. The Albion were outfought and out-thought by Roy Hodgson’s Eagles, who won 1-0 after the pathetic defending we saw earlier in February returned to gift Jordan Ayew the only goal of the game.
Maupay and March both missed chances that a granny on roller skates could have scored. The only good moment from a Brighton point of view was Schelotto managing to cause Wilfried Zaha to lose his mind towards the end of the first half.
The Argentinian right back began a fantastic sequence of events by launching a ball at the head of an unaware Zaha. When Zaha took exception to that, Schelotto did a crying gesture at poor, ickle Wilf, which upset him even more.
Toys were left strewn all over the north west corner of the Amex as Zaha threw a tantrum and Schelotto was booked for his efforts. Those antics clearly threw Zaha off his stride as he somehow managed to miss an open goal from five yards late on.
Schelotto ended up winning our WeAreBrighton.com February Player of the Month award, largely off the back of him winding up Zaha.
When pretending to cry in order to mock an opponent is enough to see you crowned as a club’s best performer across four games and five Saturdays, you know it has been a bad month.
Brighton ended February just a point above the relegation zone and with the toughest sequence of remaining fixtures of any side in the battle to avoid the drop in the 2019-20 season.
With their winless run stretching back to December 28th and the failure to beat any of Aston Villa, Bournemouth, West Ham United or Watford since the turn of the year, it was hard to see where the next victory was coming from.
Dropping into the Championship was now a very real proposition. Little did we know that by mid-March, football would have become an afterthought.
February 2020 record: P4 W0 D3 L1 F5 A6
Results: 3-3 v West Ham (A), 1-1 v Watford (H), 1-1 v Sheffield United (A), 0-1 v Crystal Palace (H)
League position at the end of the month: 15th
WeAreBrighton.com Player of the Month: Ezequiel Schelotto
