Match Review – Liverpool 4-0 Brighton
Manchester City may have been crowned the Premier League champions this season, but if you are a Brighton and Hove Albion fan then you won’t have seen a better team than Liverpool.
The Albion’s aggregate score against the Champions League finalists is a 9-1 defeat, a 4-0 final day loss at Anfield joining the 5-1 demolition job they carried out on us back at the Amex in December.
It probably didn’t help that our players looked like they were already on the beach while Liverpool had cup final places to play for and Mo Salah looking to break the top flight scoring record in a 38 game season. Egypt’s second best player after Adam El-Abd duly did that with the opener just past the 30 minute mark as Jurgen Klopp’s side displayed their famous gegenpressing, thunder and lightning football.
If weather terms can be applied to football, then the Albion were more like the stranded drunk on West Street in the pissing down rain at 2am in the morning who realises his only option to stay dry is to go to Pryzm and then Buddies. Salah’s 32nd of the campaign when he produced a low finish from Dominic Solanke’s pass and Dejan Lovren doubled the advantage with a header from a Andrew Robertson cross. That made it 24 goals out of 54 conceded from crosses this season. There’s your first piece of work for this summer, Mr Hughton.
Two more arrived in the second half as both Solanke and Robertson scored their firsts for the Reds to break Brighton’s impressive record of never having lost away this season by more than two goals. We’ve only won twice on the road all season though, scoring just 10 times along the way. There’s your second piece of work for this summer, Mr Hughton.
From an Albion point of view, it was a strange afternoon with plenty of players looking like the season had finished a week ago, which in fairness it sort of had. Shane Duffy hobbled off with 20 minutes remaining but he had looked out of sorts all game, as if he had other things on his mind like becoming an Irish version of Bill Clinton for denying having sexual relations with that woman.
Ezequiel Schelotto was again like a fish out of water, continuing his mystifying form of either being incredible or looking like a bloke who was won a competition to start at right back. As for Jurgen Locadia, well it was always going to be a difficult game for whoever was asked to lead the line given the lack of possession and the fact that creator-in-chief Pascal Gross was named on the bench.
But even so, Leonardo Ulloa at Manchester City four days previously and Glenn Murray at Manchester United back in November have showed it is possible for an Albion striker to make things happen away from home against the top six. Two things jump out at you when you watch Locadia – one is that he doesn’t look as if he can play in a system with one target man striker. He’s already made the pretty startling admission that he can’t head the ball which is kind of important for a target man and his showing through the middle did little to dispel that notion. Given that it seems highly unlikely that Hughton will switch to two up front next season given how influential Gross is in the hole, questions need to be asked about where he fits in.
That ties in with the second thing that jumps out at you, which is why exactly have we signed him if he doesn’t fit the way Hughton plays? It’s almost as if the club knew they had to sign a striker – any striker – to placate restless fans and so purchased whatever they could find in January. Let’s hope that isn’t the case, but right now it doesn’t look like Locadia has the skill set to fit into the current Brighton way.
And so the curtain came down on the season, and what a season it has been. 15th spot represented two spots higher than we would’ve settled for and being seven points away from the relegation zone was a little further than we’d have expected to be. Remarkably, it could have been even better given we were 10th after defeating Arsenal in March and have only won once since then. The difference in prize money between 10th and 15th? Just the £9.8m.
Not that we’re complaining. See you next season, Premier League.
