Match Report: Norwich City 0-1 Brighton

Norwich City 0-1 Brighton & Hove Albion. Hardly a great advert for the entertainment value of the Premier League and you could not blame any neutrals watching from either changing the channel to watch Miss Marple on Alibi or slipping into a coma through boredom.

Not that anybody with Brighton connections will have cared about how much enjoyment the rest of the nation was getting. The Albion went to Carrow Road with one objective – secure the points that would guarantee another season of top flight football. It wasn’t pretty, but after 90 nail biting minutes, it was job done. Brighton are now all but safe.

The mathematicians may beg to differ, but it would take a seriously freaky set of circumstances for the Albion to be relegated. Three of the five teams below us in the Premier League table would need to pick up nine points from their remaining fixtures with Brighton losing every game left.

Given that the bottom five seem to have returned from lockdown with their own personal competition to see who can out-shit the others, that seems highly unlikely.

Plucky Little Bournemouth have just been hammered 4-1 at home by Newcastle United and 5-2 at Manchester United. Where are their three wins coming from?

West Ham United have a tough run-in, Aston Villa are in more of a mess than Jack Grealish makes of parked cars and lockdown came at just the wrong time for Watford, who seem to have lost the momentum that becoming the first side to beat Liverpool in the league this season should have given them. They were well beaten 3-0 at Chelsea a few hours after Norwich 0-1 Brighton.

And speaking of Norwich, they are cooked like a Christmas turkey. Fair play to Daniel Farke for sticking to his philosophies of keeping the ball and attempting to attack, but they have found out the very hard way that there is a world of difference between carving opponents apart in the Championship and doing it in the top flight.

The Canaries are a possession team who cannot keep possession, which is slightly problematic. Opponents haven’t needed to go to Carrow Road this season and try and win games because Norwich are capable of throwing them away on their own.

You simply have to wait for them to lose the ball trying to play a brand of football they are ill equipped to deliver at the highest level and then punish the mistake. Something which Brighton did ruthlessly to score the only goal midway through the first half.

Norwich gave away possession needlessly in midfield. An Yves Bissouma pass, a Neal Maupay thread, a low Aaron Mooy cross from the right wing and a deft flick past Tim Krul from Leandro Trossard later and the Albion had the goal which made it Norwich 0-1 Brighton – and which will almost certainly keep the Albion up.

It was beautifully worked, but no other Premier League side would have put themselves in the position to concede in the first place with such a poor mistake – which is why Norwich are the division’s bottom club, and Jake Humphrey’s summer tweet saying we should all be pleased about getting the chance to watch them in the Premier League looks even more stupid a year on than it did at the time.

Trossard, Mooy and Maupay were three of the four changes from Potter’s starting line up for the 3-0 hammering at the hands of Manchester United. Adam Webster also returned from injury, slotting straight in at the expense of Shane Duffy.

There was no Tariq Lamptey on the right wing or Aaron Connolly playing as a 5’4 target man trying to win long balls in the air. Potter’s selection suggested that he had laid off the glue sniffing before naming his team this time as there was an eminently sensible 4-4-2 formation too.

Lamptey responded to being returned to his natural right back berth with another man-of-the-match performance. Plucking him from Chelsea for a shade under £4 million looks like the best bargain since Papa John’s offered any pizza, any size for £4.99 collection.

He wasn’t the only player in the stripes to impress as Brighton beat Norwich 0-1. Maupay offered the attack a focal point which had been sorely missing against United and Mooy shone after a difficult opening 20 minutes.

Despite it being just 14°C in Norwich with rain the air, Mooy clearly needed the water break midway through the first half as he looked a rejuvenated player after taking on some magic watrter, delivering the probing cross which Trossard guided past Krul.

It was a clever finish from Trossard and a reminder of his talents. If the Belgian can find some sort of consistency, he has the ability to be a real menace to Premier League defenders.

The goal was Trossard’s fourth of the season, a respectable total for a player who has had his fair share of little niggles. Annoyingly, it took him above own goals in the Albion scoring charts, making the “Brighton’s second top scorer is Own Goals, what a signing he has been,” joke redundant for the time being.

Neither side really looked like scoring after Trossard struck and it is hard to recall either Krul or Maty Ryan making a save of any note.

There was one late scare when Adam Idah climbed highest in the box as the game ticked into the 96th minute. Ryan was beaten by Idah’s header and rooted to the spot as the ball crashed into the post.

We’d been here before at Norwich, of course. Are you even a Brighton fan if you weren’t expecting it to rebound into the head of Maty Ryan and into the goal, ala David Stockdale (twice) on our last visit to Carrow Road?

Thankfully, the ball missed Ryan when it cannoned off the upright, instead rolling back to the centre of the goal. After what felt like a lifetime waiting to see if a gold shirt would arrive to turn it home or a blue and white shirt to clear, Big Dan Burn’s gangly frame loomed into view and he hacked away.

Sheer relief greeted the passing of the home side’s last chance, especially given that they had not come from behind to take a point in the Premier League this season. It would have been classic Brighton had the Albion been the opponents that statisticc was ended against.

With pubs now allowed to open across England, hopefully somebody found a Norwich watering hole before the journey home and bought the post a pint afterwards. It was the least the woodwork deserved for keeping intact Ryan’s eighth clean sheet of the season so late in the game.

And so on the day in which social distancing rules were relaxed in England, Brighton ignored government advice and increased the gap between themselves and the Championship to the most significant margin it has been this season.

Nine points clear. Five games to play. ‘Super Saturday’ might be remembered by the rest of the country as the day they could get a haircut or sit in a Wetherspoons for the first time in 15 weeks.

For Albion fans, it was super for a very different reason. We are staying up.