10 top moments from a decade of WeAreBrighton.com

Time flies when you’re having fun, and that has certainly been the case when it comes to WeAreBrighton.com with the website reaching it’s 10th birthday on February 25th 2019.

When we first started posting about all things Brighton, the Albion had former television salesman Dean White in temporary charge and were heading for League Two. The first game that the site existed for was a 4-0 home defeat to Crewe Alexandra, the sort of result that can set you up nicely for 10 years of negativity.

Needless to say, we’ve come a long way in the last decade. WeAreBrighton.com now boast over 48,000 followers on Twitter, approaching 10,000 on Facebook and in 2018 the site had over two million page views. Don’t suppose the Albion have done badly in that time, either.

To celebrate, we’ve put together our 10 top moments from 10 years of writing bollocks about the football club we love. Thank you to everyone who has followed us, read something or called us bellends after a particularly heavy days drinking at an away game. Here’s to the next decade, which we can hopefully also get through without being sued.

Twitter wars with David Stockdale
We couldn’t really start this list with anyone else but our old mate, David Stockdale. Stockdale endured a testing first season with the Albion in 2014-15, a number of high-profile mistakes coupled with an alarmingly large belly seeing him come under plenty of scrutiny. How could a £1.5m goalkeeper be so out of shape, we all wondered?

In April, another excellent Stockdale blunder had ensured that Brighton became the first side to lose against Wigan Athletic at the DW Stadium in nine months. We tweeted about his clanger and noticeable weight gain, before settling down for the long journey back to London Euston with a crate of Heineken and a chicken kebab.

There was much surprise and delight then when less than an hour into the journey, we got a notification – Stockdale had replied to the tweet calling us “very silly”. This sparked a fantastic argument for the duration of the trip home, including Stockdale asking how fat we actually thought he was and us responding with why, if he was as good as he thought he was, he was playing in a team heading for League One and not in the Premier League?

What made this even stranger was that we hadn’t actually tagged Stockdale in the original tweet, which meant that he must have got on the team coach and actively searched for his own name on Twitter, looking for tweets about him. Probably not the best idea when you’ve thrown away two points against the second worst team in the division, Dave.

It turned out that Stockdale had form for this. A few days later, he went after Adam Virgo who had said Stockdale had been very lucky when another mistake which cost a goal was instead judged to be a foul by the referee. This time, the tweet that Stockdale replied to was from over a month before and again, he hadn’t been tagged in it. Perhaps if Dave had concentrated less on eating pies whilst scouring through Twitter looking for posts about himself and more on goalkeeping, he wouldn’t have been such a disaster zone in his first season with the club.

 

Linking the Albion with Nicolas Maurice-Belay
Never heard of Nicolas Maurice-Belay? Neither had we until we decided to see just how far a transfer rumour started on Twitter could go. Using an account under the name of @David_SmithMgmt, we posted a series of tweets posing a football agent, the majority of which featured ridiculous management phrases that would make even David Brent or Nigel Adkins blush. We then decided to find a random player on the continent that we could link the Albion with.

A quick Google search decreed that the lucky man was Maurice-Belay, a 30-year-old French winger playing in Ligue 1 for Bordeaux. As his “agent”, we then posted a series of messages suggesting that he was close to joining the Albion as well as several other Championship clubs including Wolverhampton Wanderers and Sheffield Wednesday.

Remarkably, this was enough to set the rumour mill into overdrive. It sparked a 17 page thread on North Stand Chat and the site even posted one of their “look at us, we’re in the know” articles saying “NSC understands that Nicolas Maurice-Belay is eyeing up the Albion, amongst a trio of Championship options available to him”.

Except they weren’t in the know, of course. The whole thing was bollocks. NSC weren’t the only ones fooled – there was also a substantial thread on Wolves’ forum Molineux Mix debating Maurice-Belay’s possible arrival at Molineux. Which just goes to show you shouldn’t believe anything you read on Twitter.
 

Collecting a trophy from Paul Barber minutes after he’d used a speech telling people not to listen to us
The summer of 2014 was one of the more frustrating in recent memory. Oscar Garcia had resigned and Sami Hyypia had been appointed in his place, but the Albion’s transfer business with the season just a month away had been non existent. This was particularly concerning given that we’d released first choice goalkeeper Tomasz Kuszczak; Matthew Upson had turned down a new contract to move to Leicester City; Stephen Ward, Keith Andrews and Jesse Lingard had departed at the end of their loan spells and Will Buckley and Leonardo Ulloa were almost certainly going to be sold to Premier League clubs. That meant that seven first team regulars had or were on their way out with no replacements signed.

WeAreBrighton.com been extremely critical of this approach, which seemingly didn’t sit well with Paul Barber. The Albion’s Chief Executive had come along to present the trophy to the winners of the Falmer Cup, an annual tournament for Brighton fans hosted by the South West Corner group, and he used a speech in The Swan before handing the winners medals to reassure supporters that we had been very active on the recruitment front and that deals were in place but that they were taking a little longer because of the ongoing World Cup.

He also urged fans to ignore the ramblings of websites and blogs who he felt had been unfairly critical of the club over the summer – such as WeAreBrighton.com. Speech finished, Barber then had to hand over the Falmer Cup to the winners of the tournament – WeAreBrighton.com. You were saying, Paul?

Going on the BBC Radio Leeds Breakfast show to call their fans arrogant and Elland Road ramshackle
Ahead of the opening game of the 2013-14 season, BBC Radio Leeds were looking for a Brighton supporter to appear on their Saturday morning breakfast show before the Albion’s game at Elland Road. In a stroke of luck, the WeAreBrighton.com team had gone up to Leeds on the Friday and were staying over, which meant that we could join them in the studio come Saturday morning.

The only problem with this was that the slot was booked in for 7am and what with Leeds being a fantastic drinking city and everything, we hadn’t rolled in from a club until 4am. After just two hours sleep and quite clearly still pissed, there we found ourselves sat in the studio giving a pretty frank appraisal about Leeds United and their supporters. This involved calling them the most arrogant set of fans in the country for thinking they had some sort of divine right to be in the Premier League before going onto slate Elland Road asone of the most ramshackle stadiums in the country – all broadcast live into the homes of thousands of people across the city.

We haven’t been invited back since.

Getting Tony Bloom pissed on Strongbow
It’s a well known fact that Tony Bloom likes to travel to away games on the train and we were lucky enough to convince him to forsake his seat in first class in favour of joining us for the journey back from Huddersfield in December 2010 after the Albion’s 2-1 League One defeat at the Galpham Stadium.

Bloom was fantastic company and he got right into the spirit of things by tucking into about five cans of Strongbow on the way back to London. Bloom even gave his tie to one member of the WeAreBrighton.com team as a wedding gift ahead of our man’s upcoming nuptials a couple of weeks later. Bloom left us at Kings Cross with the departing words of, “I can’t believe you’ve got me pissed on Strongbow,” but unfortunately the exclusive chat we’d had with the Albion chairman was forever lost as we are ourselves were pretty hammered and ended up missing the last train back to Sussex. By the time we woke up at 7am on Sunday morning having slept rough outside London Bridge Station, phone, wallet and interview had all been lost.

Mocking up Lewis Dunk scoring another own goal against Liverpool
Lewis Dunk loves an own goal against Liverpool. In our match preview before the Reds’ fist Premier League visit to the Amex, we mocked up a picture for the Albion centre back advising him which end he needed to score in after his fantastic own goal in the 6-1 FA Cup Fifth Round defeat at Anfield some five-and-a-half-years previously.

Needless to say, the inevitable happened that afternoon and Dunk scored a second own goal in two games against Liverpool as Jurgen Klopp’s side sauntered to a 5-1 win. Cue the post going viral. Unfortunately, our clairvoyance didn’t extend to that night’s National Lottery numbers.

Sorry #mcfc fans but the FA have got their back. Title is done. Disgrace

— We Are Brighton (@wearebrighton) January 12, 2019

Suggesting the Premier League was rigged so Liverpool would win the title
Speaking of Liverpool, we managed to upset a lot of their precious fans in the wake of their recent 1-0 win at the Amex. Kevin Friend awarded every 50-50 call the way of Klopp’s side and although we had no real complaints about the penalty that won the game, the fact that every Brighton attack was brought to a premature end by an appalling refereeing decision was infuriating.

There’s no better way to get over such frustration than by suggesting the Premier League have rigged the title so that it goes to Anfield. Which is exactly what we did on Twitter, with the post picking up support from across the footballing world. There were even articles written about it. Perhaps we should’ve gone full-on Liverpool and started a petition demanding justice as well.

Revealing the Albion’s new away kit 24 hours before it’s official release date
The Albion had spent days bigging up the reveal of the club’s first Premier League away kit in the summer of 2017, setting a date and time and ramping up expectations. The only problem being that it had been inadvertently leaked before the unveiling.

Royal Blood drummer Ben Thatcher (not the Manchester City defender who nearly decapitated Pedro Mendes) had worn the new shirt on stage during the Brighton-based bands gig at the Metro Theatre, Sydney. WeAreBrighton.com picked up on this and we ran a blog revealing the new kit a day before it’s official release. That forced the Albion to try and claim in a statement that this was all planned, part of “the first ever overseas unveiling of a Premier League kit”, with Royal Blood deliberately revealing the new shirt 24 hours before the official date.

Except it wasn’t. The gig in Sydney had taken place a whole six days before the big reveal. It was just another brilliant Albion Kit Cock Up

Dreaming up a Brighton and Hove Albion curry menu
We’ve written plenty of bollocks on WeAreBrighton.com over the past decade, especially when it comes to shit puns. Turning every horse in the Grand National into a Brighton player. The Albion Halloween Party in an Ian Hauntedhouse full of Danny Cobwebbs and Inigo Cauldrons. Coming up with Brighton flavoured crisps – pack of Prawn Stockdale anyone?

The biggest amount of crap – and our personal favourite – came with our Albion Indian Banquet. When the visit of Everton to the Amex was moved to a Sunday lunchtime kick off so it could be shown live on Indian television, we decided to get into the spirit by coming up with a Seagulls-themed curry menu, featuring such terrible wordplay as Davy Propperdom, Samosa Baldock and a Mark Chicken Kormarod.

The Colin Hawkins Tribute Video
No words needed for this one – just a tribute video to the Albion career of our favourite ever player. Take a bow, Colin Hawkins.