Are those Albion fans saying Boo or Boo-urn?
It is Monday 17th April 2017. Brighton & Hove Albion have just beaten Wigan Athletic 2-1 at the Amex Stadium to win promotion to the Premier League. A 34 year wait for top flight football is over.
A fan shares his thoughts while we both queue for the bar in the West Stand concourse post-match: “Well, we nearly fucked that up. What a load of crap.”
The lifetime contract of the football supporter means they get to experience: scoring last minute winners, conceding last minute winners, losing to nine men, beating the Premier League champions, getting knocked out of the cup by Sudbury Town.
Those crushing lows tend to give the dizzying highs greater meaning. And once you’ve had a fairly sustained period of success, defeats become harder to tolerate. Enter present era Brighton & Hove Albion FC.
Those nerdy journos that actually read things like statistics and metrics and, well, the raw data that explains what happens on the pitch, all say what a good outfit we are.
We got promoted and stayed there before introducing a totally new style of play. We’ve got a manager who luckily still hasn’t convinced enough people that he’s destined for a bigger club than us.
And we have a recruitment strategy that is designed to identify good value for money while being truly global in its outlook. Patronising pats on the head from fans of bigger clubs are in abundant supply. So why do some of us boo?
Well, one of the problems is that we often feel like our team is about £30 million away from being really quite good.
The Man In The Pub analysis of, “They’re nice to watch, Jeff, but they’re not killers, they just need a top quality striker, then they’ll be alright, guarantee it,” is problematic, mostly because it so often feels like the truth.
At times you feel the ethos and structure we have is not so much designed to make us a successful football club but more to actually redefine the game as we know it.
Why are we bothering with scoring goals? Are we not better off pursuing other metrics? What even is ‘goal’? Don’t such trivial social constructs just get in the way of our grander aims?
It is Saturday 27th November 2021. Brighton & Hove Albion have just drawn 0-0 with Leeds United. The Seagulls sit 8th in the Premier League table.
A fan on the train offers his thoughts on top scorer and misser of two big chances in the game, Neal Maupay: “He’s got to go, hasn’t he? He’s just useless. Two absolute sitters today.”
Meanwhile, Graham Potter retaliates to loud booing in the home section, sarcastically suggesting he might need a “history lesson” on Brighton and Hove Albion FC.
British folk love nothing more than peering back in time, misty-eyed, to when everything was better/worse than it is now.
Did you know that 10 years prior to that Leeds game, Brighton were in League One? And that they failed to beat a team of postmen and builders called FC United of Manchester in the FA Cup, a team that didn’t even exist several years previously?
Well yes I did know that, and actually that is a poor example. You could also say we were then in the midst of a title winning season in which we won the thing ahead of, to be frank, a Premier League-ready Southampton squad containing (if memory serves) the Ox, Lambert, Lallana, Schneiderlin, Fonte, Messi, and Dan Burn.
History, like stats, can be used to prove anything, and just because we were bad in 2006 it doesn’t mean we can’t be annoyed at failing to hit an elephant’s behind with a double bass in 2021.
Let’s have another stat: the 1-0 defeat against Wolves marks 11 games without a win for the first time in our Premier League tenure. Alternatively, with 20 points from 16 games, we are on course to comfortably eclipse our previous PL points record.
I think the mistake we make is not in getting annoyed but in trying to justify it as anything more than frustration at your football teaming temporarily being a bit crap.
You can just say “Wow, he should have buried that” instead of “Yeah, this person is not only not good enough for us but he’s a fundamentally dreadful human being and probably did it to personally inconvenience me. The manager is also shit, come to think of it”.
It’s very much a game of moments, football. Retroactively fitting an overarching narrative onto a situation does tend to (wrongly) give people the knowing sense of ‘having perspective‘ and escaping the naivety trap.
Narratives are generally a bit fanciful. We all allow ourselves to be vulnerable and react to the bad and the good. And it’s fine to just say that there are ups and there are downs.
Southampton and Palace away were pretty abysmal until That Man decided to do the footballing equivalent of telling a ‘your mum’ joke in the home dressing room and running away.
Is there anything to be said for taking the rough with the smooth and enjoying the ride as much as one can? Maybe not…
It is Saturday 25th May 2031. Brighton & Hove Albion have just beaten Bayern Munich 3-1. Brighton are Champions of Europe.
A fan offers his thoughts as the team parade the trophy around the pitch at the Camp Nou: “Tell you what, Evan Ferguson is just not up to this level. That free-kick from 40 yards that hit the post? Awful. Still, suppose he’s better than that dross we had 10 years ago”.
Edward Woodhouse @edwardwoodhouse
