Brighton need to be more clinical if this isn’t to be a season of struggle

We’re five games into the Graham Potter era and so far, that has yielded five points. Average a point a match in the Premier League and you’ll just about stay up, so if survival is the aim of the game then it has been a solid if unspectacular start for the new Albion boss.

But points of course only tell half the story. For the glass-half-full brigade, we could be sitting far higher up the table had certain circumstances not conspired against us.

VAR cost us two points against West Ham United, not to mention the sparkling form of Lukasz Fabianski. Florin Andone was arguably the reason we didn’t get all three despite a brave showing against Southampton, playing with 10 men for over an hour.

And then on Saturday, Jeff Hendrick scored a 91st minute equaliser for Burnley with the Clarets’ only shot of the game. With a little more luck, we could feasibly have 12 points. That would put us second in the table.

Unrealistic? Perhaps. But it isn’t too far-fetched to suggest that we should have nine points. Maybe 10. Either of those totals would put us third.

Of course, the glass-half-empty club have a counter argument. Picking up just two points from home games against West Ham, Southampton and Burnley is the sort of return that gets you relegated.

We’ve only got five points from a ridiculously easy start to the campaign. Manchester City are the only one of the big six the Albion have faced and with games in the coming weeks against Chelsea and Tottenham Hotspur, we really needed as many points on the board as possible by now.

And they’d be right. Two points from the first three home games is poor. The football may have been entertaining and a million miles away from the dirge served up in the final months of Chris Hughton’s reign, but you don’t get bonus points for playing well. The Premier League aren’t going to think, “Blimey, Pep Guardiola said Brighton played nice football when they lost 4-0 at the Etihad, lets stick them onto seven points as a reward.”

For all the talk of VAR, Andone’s stupidity and never beating Burnley, the reason that we don’t have the points return that we deserve can be found much closer to home – we just aren’t clinical enough.

Here are some numbers for you: 5, 16, 12, 6, 14. That’s how many shots Brighton have taken in each of their five Premier League fixtures so far. 54 efforts which have yielded five goals. And three of those goals came against a dreadful Watford side.

13 of those shots have been recorded as being on target, so we’re effectively scoring one third of the chances that actually go towards the goal. That isn’t a terrible average. What’s terrible is the number of efforts that are put wastefully off target, and it’s really costing us.

There are a few that stick in the memory. Davy Propper’s header against Burnley was the most recent, but we’ve seen Neal Maupay miss what was nearly an open goal from about 10 yards out against West Ham and Jurgen Locadia hit the post from six yards against Southampton.

Glenn Murray – the third most clinical striker in the Premier League last season after Anthony Martial and Sadio Mane – has been guilty of a couple of bad misses. Leandro Trossard too, for all his enterprising approach play, could be on three or four for the season already with a little more composure.

The spurning of so many chances at one end of the pitch is compounded by what is going on at the other. Here are a couple more numbers for you: 8, 17. Maty Ryan has faced 17 shots in the Premier League this season, and eight of them have gone in.

What’s going on there, goodness knows. Ryan is clearly a quality goalkeeper, but he seems to be going through a phase where every other shot flies into the back of the net. Virtually the only thing he had to do against Burnley was pick the ball out of the back of the net.

When you’re conceding one in every two shots you face, you can’t afford to be putting four in every five shots you take off target.

That was the beauty of Chris Hughton’s team. People may have decried the anti-football and the lack of entertainment and it was certainly dire from Christmas onwards, but prior to that you knew that one goal might be enough.

With Potter’s more attacking style, we’re more open at the other end. Against Premier League quality players, that means you’re going to concede more goals and if you’re conceding more goals, then you need to score more to win games of football. Not exactly rocket science, is it?

And that is Potter’s big challenge. We’re creating chances, but how does he now ensure that more of them are on target? It’s a difficult one to answer without finding and then chucking millions and millions of pounds at a better grade of centre forward.

Murray’s statistics over the past two seasons prove that he can be clinical. In the Premier League era, no individual has been responsible for a bigger share of a team’s goals than Murray has by scoring 36% of the Albion’s top flight total since promotion.

We’ve already noted that Murray had a better goals-per-shot ratio than Mo Salah, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang and Sergio Aguero in 2018-19.

The thing with Murray is that his goals tend to come in bursts. Once he scores one, a second will follow, then a third, then a fourth. His problem at the minute is getting that first. The sooner it arrives, the better as the likelihood it will set him on the sort of scoring spree that we could really do with right now.

Then there’s Maupay. We’ve been quietly impressed, especially as most assumed it might take him a while to get up-to-speed with the Premier League. Two very well taken goals from five appearances is a decent return and the suspicion is that there is a lot more to come.

That heaps a lot of pressure on those two. It might be nice if the midfield began chipping in; Dale Stephens and Davy Propper have two goals between them in two years. Yves Bissouma is yet to score a Premier League goal and Aaron Mooy hasn’t had a real opportunity to show what he can do yet – his record of seven goals in two seasons in a struggling Huddersfield Town team is decent enough.

If Brighton can start taking more of their chances, then it won’t be long before we’re climbing that Premier League table. Turning all this bright attacking approach play into something tangible on the scoreboard over the coming weeks could well determine whether the Potter era succeeds or fails.