End of an era as Andy Naylor leaves The Argus

It’s the end of an era in the world of reporting on the Albion as Andy Naylor hangs up his Argus pen after 32 years of service.

In that time, Andy has covered the Albion through six promotions and five relegations by our reckoning. He’s reported on games in all four divisions under 19 different managers and seen Brighton rise from 92nd in the Football League all the way up to eighth.

Before the internet existed, his reports were the only real way of knowing exactly what had happened in a game you weren’t able to make it to.

How did that new striker Kurt Nogan get on? Was that Valur Gislason bloke signed on loan from Arsenal any good? Had Nicky Rust really kept us in the game?

As a Brighton-mad kid growing up in the early 1990s, I remember coming home from school every day and waiting patiently for The Evening Argus to be delivered.

There were two editions of the paper back then – one in the morning, one in the evening – and as soon as that day’s newspaper dropped through the letterbox, I’d turn straight to the back page in a desperate search for news about the Albion. It was Andy who would break it.

Whole generations of Seagulls fans have grown up with his writing. After Brighton had destroyed Mansfield Town 6-0 in the first game at Withdean, my parents decided to celebrate by having a session in our local pub.

Beer or cider wasn’t an option for me as an 11-year-old, sadly. Instead, I went to the shop opposite and bought a Sports Argus, spending the evening sat in the pub digesting every word on the paper’s pink pages published within a few hours of the final whistle as the adults toasted Micky Adams, Darren Freeman and, er, Aidan Newhouse.

The Argus was invaluable during the war years and without the paper, it’s doubtful we’d have a club now. They were the ones who broke the stories and helped investigate what was going on with the sale of the Goldstone Ground and the removal of the non-profit clause which allowed Archer, Stanley and Belotti to asset strip the club.

While Paul Bracchi was the paper’s investigative journalist and dealt with plenty of the off field shenanigans, Andy was still having to deliver news and reports from the football side.

That can’t have been easy, particularly when Belotti decided to ban the paper for having the nerve to report the fact that the owners were deliberately trying to drive it out of business.

My mother, despite being part of the efforts to keep the club alive, was convinced that ultimately that was what would happen. As a result, from the infamous “Seagulls Migrate” story right through to Hereford two years later, she cut out every single story about the saga and all of Andy’s match reports and articles and stuck them in a scrapbook.

She wanted to have something to look back on should the worst happen and the Albion cease to exist. Had the club gone out of business, it would have been Andy’s words that helped her remember the Albion.

Thankfully, that didn’t happen and instead, there is now a perfectly preserved record of the battle to save the club stored in her loft 25 years on. Those scrapbooks probably make interesting reading (coming soon to WeAreBrighton.com).

While many local newspapers have steadily declined or gone out of business in the face of the internet and social media, The Argus has continued to survive and be worth paying for because of its sports content.

Much of that is down to Andy and Brian Owen. At a time when ‘articles’ are often just copy and paste jobs from Twitter or clickbait, we’re lucky to have a sports team who continue to put the time and effort into writing engaging pieces that are worth reading.

We haven’t always agreed with what Andy writes – not to mention the fact he blocked us on Twitter for six years after we’d offered him a can of Strongbow on the train home from an away game – but that’s the sign of a good journalist, somebody who writes what they feel rather than what they think their audience want to hear.

Some supporters thought he was too close to the club to offer an objective view, but they mistook non-criticism for objectivity. As a Stoke City fan, Andy didn’t feel the hysteria or emotional connection to the club that we do which can sometimes lead to over-the-top reactions.

He was always level headed and normally fair in what he wrote, even if becoming Mark McGhee’s golf partner for a time may have clouded his opinion a little towards the end of McGhee’s time in charge.

It’s going to feel very strange reading The Argus in the 2019-20 season and not being greeted by Andy’s words. To do such a good job over 32 years is testament to his abilities and he will be sorely missed.

We can’t finish this without mentioning his greatest moment either. That came on the final day of the 2012 summer transfer window. With rumours flying that Bobby Zamora to Brighton is a done deal, Andy tweets, “Albion legend set to return”, sending the internet into meltdown.

30 minutes later and the club announce the signing of…. Dean Hammond on loan from Southampton. A brilliant piece of trolling.