Match Review: Leicester City 0-0 Brighton
There were always going to be winners and losers from the three month break from Premier League action. From what we have seen over 180 minutes so far, Brighton & Hove Albion look like they will end up being one of the clubs who thank their lucky stars for the interruption to the season.
Tuesday night’s 0-0 draw with Leicester City made it four points from two games for Brighton since the season resumed.
Those two games have come against two sides with designs on a top five finish – even if the Albion’s recent record against weekend opponents Arsenal gave some Seagulls supporters hope of beating the Gunners.
It’s a far cry from results and performances pre-lockdown, when the Seagulls recorded just two wins in 19 games in all competitions to slide into the relegation battle.
Had this game taken place in the regular season, Brighton would have faced a very different Leicester. Not many Albion fans would have expected their team to return from the King Power Stadium with something for their efforts as pre-March, the Foxes were scoring goals for fun and looked on course to finish third behind Liverpool and Manchester City.
Attacking, entertaining sides such as Leicester take time to gel though. That sort of football does not just happen overnight, as the Foxes early season form showed when they won just once in their opening four games before hitting their stride.
After a break of three months, Leicester will again need minutes in the bank before they rediscover their rhythm. Brighton perhaps lucked out by having them second game up following the restart as the Foxes certainly looked like an outfit feeling their way back, which goes part of the way to explaining why the Albion left the King Power with a point.
It could have been more than a point too. In a game of few chances, Neal Maupay squandered the best with a poorly taken first half penalty. Had the Frenchman converted, we could have been watching a famous win unfurl on our television screens.
Maupay has been in the headlines nonstop since his match winning performance against the Gunners on Saturday. He’s made himself a pantomime villain among Arsenal fans and judging by their reactions on Twitter to the spot kick, they took a great amount of joy from Maupay’s miss.
What a fall from grace that is. The mighty Arsenal; the club of Thierry Henry and Arsene Wenger; a team of double winners and invicibles; reduced to celebrating a Brighton striker missing a penalty at Leicester City. Bless.
Maupay isn’t the first player to squander a chance from 12 yards against Leicester and history suggest he won’t be the last. Glenn Murray saw a penalty saved by Kasper Schmeichel at the Amex in our first season as a Premier League club.
There was a much more infamous miss from Ashley Barnes in the 2012-13 campaign. Schmeichel again saved with Barnes somehow blasting the rebound over despite being just six yards out from an open goal.
Leicester won that clash 1-0 against Brighton with Tomasz Kuszczak not holding back with his feelings at the final whistle as him and Barnes nearly had a punch up on the pitch.
Thankfully, there was no repeat of that this time between Maupay and Maty Ryan. There might have been had Jamie Vardy managed to convert when Ryan somehow managed to throw the ball towards his own goal when aiming the other way midway through the first half.
Luckily for the Australian number one, he reacted just about quick enough to chase after and regather the ball before Vardy could pounce. That Ryan created the Foxes’ best chance of the game says a lot about the defensive effort that Brighton put in to draw 0-0.
The standout player in Brighton’s back four was Tariq Lamptey. Graham Potter handing him a full Premier League debut was hardly a shock given the mauling that Brighton have had against pacy sides such as Leicester this season.
What was a surprise was just how comfortable he looked. Watching on television, Lamptey resembled a 14-year-old who had accidentally wandered onto the pitch at the King Power Stadium when he should have been heading for a year nine science class.
Lamptey played though like a Premier League veteran. Position wise he was excellent, his decision making was spot on and he was one of Brighton’s best players in possession.
It’s always easy to give man-of-the-match honours to a young player making his debut because it is a young player making his debut, but on this occasion it was 100% earned.
Lamptey wasn’t the only youthful member of Graham Potter’s exciting starting XI. Potter selected the youngest line up that Brighton have named in the Premier League, a remarkable shift from the Chris Hughton era when you would be more likely to find a set of hens teeth than a player under the age of 25 in a Seagulls side.
20-year-old Aaron Connolly led the line alongside 23-year-old Maupay. It is easy to forget how young Maupay is given that he is a bit of a bastard, as Arsenal fans have spent the lat 72 hours moaning about.
23-year-old Yves Bissouma gave yet another mature performance in midfield and then there was 21-year-old Alexis Mac Allister. The Argentinian is the man that every Brighton fan wanted to see in Potter’s starting line up.
Mac Allister started brightly, fizzing a right footed free kick into the wall before collecting the loose ball and bending over a testing left footed cross.
He faded as the game went on though and was withdrawn by Potter as part of a treble substitution with an hour gone. Given that some Brighton fans have him marked out as the heir to Lionel Messi, a 0-0 draw with Leicester probably isn’t the debut that they envisioned.
But it serves as an important reminder though that Mac Allister is a young man playing outside of Argentina for the first time.
He will take time to adjust to the Premier League, much more so than Lamptey who has grown up with the footballing culture in England at arguably the finest academy in the country, Chelsea.
That much was evident in the performances of the respective full debutants at the King Power – Lamptey is oven-ready for English football as Boris Johnson might say, Mac Allister will need a little longer to adjust.
Playing Premier League football will only help the Albion’s two January arrivals in that regard. The sooner that Brighton secure their top flight place for next season, the sooner Potter can begin experimenting further with young players like Mac Allister and Lamptey in games which have nothing riding on them.
This 0-0 draw at Leicester moves Brighton a step closer to that target or survival. Thanks to the point from the King Power and the 2-1 win over Arsenal on Saturday, the Albion now have 33 points on the board.
With most pundits predicting that 36 will be enough to survive, one win from the remaining seven fixtures could do it. Who thought that would be the case back when Crystal Palace left the Amex with a 1-0 win at the end of February ?
So cheers to lockdown. It appears to have helped turn our season around and suddenly, the future looks much brighter as a young Brighton side go to a Leicester team sitting third in the Premier League and grind out a 0-0 draw.
Now for three points against Manchester United to confirm survival. We’ve done that before, after all.
