Bye bye Bong – Gaetan moves from Brighton to Nottingham Forest
It’s bye bye to Gaetan Bong as Brighton and Hove Albion’s long-serving left back has completed a move to Championship side Nottingham Forest for an undisclosed fee.
One of Chris Hughton’s favourites, Bong had fallen out of the first team picture since Graham Potter took over as Albion manager in the summer.
The Cameroon international has played just 57 minutes of Premier League football in 2019-20, slipping to third in the left back pecking order behind Big Dan Burn and Bernardo.
As a result, Gaetan Bong has moved to the City Ground, signing a one-and-a-half year contract with Nottingham Forest. He also becomes a rare player that Brighton have made a profit on having been signed on a free transfer in the summer of 2015 from Wigan Athletic.
That’s proven to be a bargain bit of business given everything that he’s gone onto achieve with the Albion. Bong played 102 times over the course of his four-and-a-half years at the club, never putting a foot wrong as one of the most underrated players in the squad that became only the second ever group in Brighton history to win promotion to the top flight.
Bong did struggle with the step up to the top flight at times, but there’s no shame in that – plenty of Hughton’s 2016-17 squad suffered the same fate, including Tomer Hemed, Beram Kayal and Sam Baldock.
None of them received the disgusting treatment that Bong did from sections of the Albion support though, which reached it’s nadir in the 1-0 FA Cup Third Round defeat against Sheffield Wednesday earlier this month, which turned out to be his final game for the club.
Bong was substituted in the 71st minute, with the decision to withdraw him being met by sarcastic cheers from around the Amex.
Andy Naylor was sat right behind the dugout that day and reported that you could see the sadness in Bong’s eyes at the reception he’d received. Frankly, it was a disgrace and a sad way for a loyal servant to bow out.
Much has been written in recent weeks about what can be done to improve the atmosphere at the Amex, but is there really any hope when we’ve got a fan base who actively celebrate a player as loyal as Bong being substituted?
This isn’t a Leon Best or a Craig Davies, who clearly never gave a toss about Brighton and so deserved everything they got from the fans.
Bong never gave anything less than 100%. He battled back from two serious injuries during his time at the Albion, suffered alleged racial abuse at the hands of West Bromwich Albion’s Jay Rodriguez and has been an extremely active supporter of lots of the community work that the club undertakes (and who can blame him if it means getting to hang around with Laura Rafferty?)
He’s also a bloody nice guy. Twice we’ve bumped into Bong in very strange situations. One was when he pulled up outside Albion Kebabs in his Range Rover on a Tuesday night after a game at the Amex in the 2015-16 season.
The WeAreBrighton.com team were on their way to Coalition via a cheeseburger and chips when we got the chance to have a tactical debrief with Brighton’s first choice left back.
The other was when he turned up to Haywards Heath’s annual Broadway Day, where the town council shuts off the main road through town, puts on a load of musical acts and people essentially get pissed in the street for 10 hours and dance to ABBA tribute bands.
For reasons we’ve never understood, Bong was there. You won’t find many other professional footballers happy to stop and have a chat outside Pizza Hut with a couple of supporters who are drinking sangria out of a 2 litre milk cartoon.
Potter mentioned Bong’s attitude in his comments to The Argus following confirmation of the move, saying, “This season he has found it hard to play regularly but his professionalism and attitude, both in training and around the squad, has always been first class.”
It’s telling that Bong has agreed to a move, despite being out of contract at the end of the season. Some players might have refused to go, instead deciding to sit out the final six months of their deal, pocketing a wage for doing nothing before picking up an inflated signing on bonus as a free agent come the summer. Not Bong though, he’s too professional for that.
Hopefully, those who cheered Bong’s substitution against Wednesday will look back now he’s gone and appreciate what he achieved at the club.
He may not have been the most glamorous of players, but if you want to win promotion then you need dependable players like him. Brighton certainly did.
Now, he’ll be aiming to help a second club into the Premier League. In Gaetan Bong, Nottingham Forest have got themselves a solid Championship left back who will be a big asset for their promotion push – and if that ends in success come May, he could yet end up back in the Premier League as Brighton tumble out of it. Food for thought for all the haters.
