Brighton & Hove Albion 2021-22 Season Review: August
After 45 minutes of Burnley away on Saturday 14th August 2021, you would have got long odds that Brighton were about to embark on a record-breaking 2021-22 Premier League season.
The first road trip Seagulls supporters had enjoyed following 18 months of lockdowns and football behind closed doors was not going entirely to plan.
After a 520 day wait to play in front of their own fans without any restrictions, Brighton managed to go 1-0 down to a completely preventable goal inside of two minutes at Turf Moor. Peak Albion, some might say.
It was a mess entirely of Graham Potter’s own making. Brighton had finished the 2020-21 season in good form, recovering from winning just two of their opening 18 Premier League games to avoid relegation by some 13 points.
From mid-January onwards, Potter finally settled on his strongest line up. He stopped chopping and changing personnel and formation and that consistency in selection led to seven victories and six draws from the final 20 games of the campaign.
Potter learnt that the way to get the best from this squad of players was with a back three. He went into the 2021-22 campaign with largely the same group, Brighton selling only Ben White for a club-record £50 million to Arsenal and bringing in Enock Mwepu from Red Bull Salzburg before the August trip to Burnley.
Having then spent the whole of pre-season – the perfect time for experimentation with formations – playing 3-4-1-2, Potter decided that Turf Moor would be the perfect place to introduce 4-1-4-1 for the first time.
With Adam Webster at right back. And Pascal Gross at left back. And Yves Bissouma in an advanced midfield role, despite having won our WAB Player of the Season 2020-21 Award for his peerless performances in the holding role the previous year. And Neal Maupay as a lone striker.
It was a selection that appeared as though it had been made by Phil Mitchell on crack. Burnley could not believe their luck and James Tarkowski put them ahead with less than 180 seconds played, heading home an Ashley Westwood corner.
The marking was abysmal and it is not like the hosts being a threat from set pieces could have come as a shock to the Albion either.
Burnley should have added to their lead over the course of the remaining 42 minutes of the first half. Gross was having a torrid time of it at left back, hardly a surprise as asking him to do a job there was the equivalent of sticking Jenny from Gogglebox in charge of a NASA project to land a manned spacecraft on Mars.
Webster was not faring much better over on the right either, seemingly caught in two minds as to whether he should be trying to play as a third centre back or an orthodox right back. Going forward, the Albion were a complete non-entity bar Shane Duffy hitting the bar with a header.
Ah yes, Duffy. With Dan Burn injured, Joel Veltman isolating because of a close contact and every half decent young centre back on the Albion’s books sent to spend a year living in Stoke-on-Trent or West Bromwich, Duffy had been returned to the Albion’s starting line up when most assumed his Brighton career to be over.
Duffy set the tone for an excellent August and start to 2021-22 on a personal level with a magnificent performance at Turf Moor, going some of the way to banish the memories of his nightmare spell on loan at boyhood club Celtic from Brighton in the previous season.
His most pivotal moment came when he cleared off the line after a Ben Mee header from another Westwood corner rattled the crossbar. That was one of three good opportunities Burnley missed as they should have been out of sight before half time.
That the Clarets only led by one gave Potter the opportunity he needed to sort things out. What followed was a Potter masterclass. The very least he had to do was correct the mistakes he had made in his initial selection.
He duly did that, Adam Lallana replacing Mwepu and a switch to a tried and tested 3-4-1-2. Webster at centre back, Gross right wing back, Solly March on the left and Leandro Trossard joining Maupay in attack.
After spending the first 45 minutes of August looking like relegation certainties, Brighton began playing the sort of football that would end up carrying them to a ninth place finish in 2021-22.
It was not just Potter’s adjustments during the interval that led to the Albion eventually winning the game. His use of substitutions was spot on too.
Jakub Moder had barely been on the pitch 60 seconds when he raced onto a Bissouma pass down the right before crossing into the box for Maupay to slide home an equaliser.
Seven minutes later and Potter introduced Alexis Mac Allister. The Lionel Messi look-a-like needed only 60 seconds or so of his own to make an impact as Brighton went from trailing 1-0 to beating Burnley 2-1 inside eight minutes.
Webster advanced on one of his charges forward with the ball at his feet to slip Gross into the penalty area. One beautiful, curling low pass into the box was delivered perfectly for Mac Allister to sweep home without breaking stride.
The Albion have never found Turf Moor an easy place to go. To win in this corner of 19th century Lancashire in front of a partisan home crowd having been on the ropes at half time was an impressive result to kick off August and the 2021-22 season with, once Potter had begun playing to his Brighton team’s strengths.
Newly promoted Watford visited the Amex next to provide a different test for Brighton. The Hornets were the sort of opponents Potter could not mastermind a win over in 2020-21 for love nor money.
Sheffield United. West Brom. Fulham. Burnley. Southampton. Crystal Palace. Wolves. Aston Villa. Everton. Last season, every club who finished in the bottom half of the Premier League left the Amex with something to show for their efforts, bar Newcastle United.
In another promising sign for the year ahead, Brighton eased their way to a 2-0 win. It took just 10 minutes for the Albion to move into the lead and there could not have been a more popular scorer.
Over came a typically pinpoint Gross corner and Duffy continued his renaissance by crashing a header into the back of the Watford net via the frame of the goal.
Who knew that all it needed for King Shane to thrive was Molly Malone’s to be shut down and the Grosvenor Casino to undergo a rebrand?
Bissouma set up the second Brighton goal with a piece of trademark midfield play. The Malian midfielder pressed aggressively to disposses Tom Cleverly before threading a through pass to Maupay.
That left the French striker one-on-one with Daniel Bachmann. With his normal record in such situations, the majority of the crowd seemed to be expecting Maupay to fire the ball somewhere towards Rottingdean.
It came as a pleasant surprise then when Maupay produced an emphatic, clinical finish which no goalkeeper would have saved to make it two goals from two games.
The job was done before half time and Brighton were able to take their foot off the gas. When the full time whistle blew, the Albion sat second in the Premier League – the highest place they have ever occupied. Suddenly, fans were dreaming of Europe.
A couple of hundred hardy souls got a taste of what it would be like travelling to foreign lands to support the Albion when the second round draw for the Camila Cabello Cup threw up a trip to Cardiff City.
Potter got the balance of his starting XI exactly right for the trip to Wales, picking a side with enough talent to win the game at the same time as giving some of the club’s talented youngsters a chance.
You could see what it meant to the players come the full time whistle as they celebrated their 2-0 victory as if they had just won the final at Wembley rather than despatching a Championship second string.
Haydon Roberts clambered into the crowd to give his shirt away. Antef Tsoungoi danced as if he were in Popworld, a nightclub that he could legally enter for the first time only eight months earlier after turning 18.
The average age of the Albion side in Cardiff 0-2 Brighton was 20.5. Captain Jason Steele was the only player who did not qualify for a Young Person’s Railcard.
Substitute Evan Ferguson was not even born when the Seagulls secured one of the most famous wins in their history in the same city as he was making his professional debut, beating Bristol City 1-0 in the Division Two playoff final a short hop away at the Millennium Stadium.
It took just nine minutes for Brighton to go 1-0 ahead. Mwepu was the architect, showing why he is known as The Computer by calculating the perfect weight needed on a 30 yard through ball played after advancing from right back.
The pass split the Cardiff defence and their attempted offside trap wide open, leaving Moder to race clear and confidently fire past Alex Smithies. A goal scoring midfielder? What was this madness.
Brighton doubled their lead midway through the second half. Moises Caicedo was making his Albion debut shortly before departing on loan for Belgian side Beerschot and he rode a couple of rough Cardiff challenges to send Andi Zeqiri away who fired low and hard past Smithies.
Zeqiri too would head to pasture new after the win over the Bluebirds, joining Freiburg. Michal Karbownik and Taylor Richards of the Brighton side who started in the Cardiff City Stadium on that balmy August evening would also go onto finish the 2021-22 season out on loan.
Everton provided the final opposition of August as the Albion returned to Premier League action hoping to make it three from three.
The Toffees had begun the campaign well under new boss Rafa Benitez. There was little sign of the terrible results and performances that would lead Benitez to lose his job and Everton to spend the season battling against relegation as the visitors ran out 2-0 winners at the Amex.
Benitez did a number on Potter, pinpointing the Albion’s dearth of natural width and lack of full backs as a weakness to exploit.
Gross at right wing back against the pace of Demari Gray was a total mismatch. It was therefore absolutely no surprise to see Gray open the scoring with four minutes of the first half remaining.
Some sloppy play in possession from Brighton gave the ball away with Everton working it to Gray about 10 yards inside the Albion half.
Gray tore forward into the vast swathe of space between Adam Webster and Gross, as if he were Usain Bolt about to set a new 100 metre world record.
Gross meanwhile looked like an articulated lorry trying to drive through a sea of treacle with its handbrake still on as he gave chase.
Who could have predicted a technically gifted, creative number 10 with no pace being played out-of-position at right wing back getting rinsed by a quick and nippy winger?
Webster proved no match for Gray either, who skipped past the despairing lunge of the Albion defender before drilling a shot past Robert Sanchez.
Just like at Burnley two weeks earlier, Potter realised that his starting XI was not working and so he changed it half time.
Unfortunately, the adjustments did not have the same impact and substitute Veltman ended up conceding a penalty within 11 minutes of entering the game.
Seamus Coleman came rampaging forward to cause Brighton further problems from wide positions, resulting in Veltman producing a clumsy challenge in the box.
No Brighton fan could complain about the award. And we were at least treated to a bit of drama before Dominic Calvert-Lewin could convert the spot kick, Richarlison acting like a spoilt child by refusing to hand the ball to Everton’s designated penalty taker until captain Coleman got involved.
Despite all the kerfuffle, Calvert-Lewin kept a cool head and although Robert Sanchez went the right way, the Albion goalkeeper could not keep the kick out.
It needed some inspired goalkeeping from Sanchez after that to prevent Everton adding to the score as the Albion surrendered their 100 percent record.
Brighton did at least respond to being outgunned in wide areas by the Toffees. A few days later and they finally offered the £15 million needed to activate the release clause in the Getafe contract of Marc Cucurella, having spent most of the summer haggling to pay less.
By the time the summer transfer window slammed shut, the wild-haired Spaniard was an Albion player – and what an impact he would have on helping Brighton turn a solid August start into a record-breaking 2021-22.
August 2021 record: P4 W3 D0 L1 F6 A3
Results: 2-1 v Burnley (A), 2-0 v Watford (H), 2-0 v Cardiff (A), 0-2 v Everton (H)
League position at the end of the month: 8th
WeAreBrighton.com Player of the Month: Yves Bissouma
