Potterball wouldn’t be possible without Hughton’s foundations

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past week, you can’t have missed the mockery that Brighton fans have been directing Jake Humphrey’s way because of an ill-advised tweet from April.

The BT Sports presenter had just finished covering the Albion’s dire 1-1 draw with Newcastle United when he logged onto Twitter to give us his two-pence worth.

You remember the game – we couldn’t string two passes together in the first half, were so bad that we should have gone into the break two or three nil down and then rescued a point when Pascal Gross scored a second half header.

That was the Albion’s first goal for 12 hours and 15 minutes – a new club record. Combined with Crystal Palace’s win over Cardiff City a week later, the point against the Toon Army proved to be enough to keep us in the Premier League, but it wasn’t hard to see why Humphrey was so unimpressed.

Having watched Brighton today, and I know I’m not impartial, but you really should be pleased about the prospect of an expansive, exciting, ambitious Norwich team…full of home-grown talents…joining the @premierleague.
👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏

— Jake Humphrey (@mrjakehumphrey) April 27, 2019

The issue that many Brighton fans seem to have taken with Humphrey’s tweet is that it wasn’t complimentary towards the Albion – people aren’t happy that he had the nerve to criticise our club for it’s style of play, which rather avoids the fact that what Humphrey wrote about us was true at the time.

The words expansive, exciting and ambitious were as ill-suited to describing Brighton last season as good looking, tolerant and well-mannered would be when used in conjunction with Katie Hopkins.

Humphrey’s tweet may have been designed to criticise the Albion and Hughton and yet here we are, six months down the line and it’s inadvertently turned into a ringing endorsement of Hughton’s approach.

Judging by his musings, Humphrey clearly thought that Norwich could rock up in the Premier League and continue playing the entertaining, attacking football that swept them to promotion.

It’s what Fulham thought last season, as well as countless other newly promoted sides – not many of whom have survived to tell the tale.

But not Hughton. He knew that the way you build something is from the bottom up, with solid foundations. You don’t construct your dream house by starting on the roof; it’s the bottom that goes in first and from there, the rest follows.

When it comes to a football team, that means you need to be hard to beat first of all. Survive in the Premier League for a few seasons by hook or by crook, get the foundations for becoming an established top flight club in place and then you can look to become more expansive, exciting and ambitious.

And that’s what Hughton did. Brighton were cautious and defensive under Hughton because we had to be for our first couple of years in the Premier League and, bar the final five months when things fell apart alarmingly (mostly because Hughton deviated from a solid and compact 4-4-1-1 in favour of 4-3-3), it was an approach that worked by-and-large.

Since Hughton’s sacking, there seem to be some Albion fans who are attempting to rewrite history a little when it comes to his time in charge.

They are determined to portray him as a man whose negativity only ever held us back, who valued a clean sheet over anything else and who never set out to win games of football.

That is of course utter bollocks. Over the course of the 2015-16 and 2016-17 Championship seasons, we scored 146 goals. The year we won promotion, Glenn Murray, Anthony Knockaert, Tomer Hemed, Sam Baldock and co plundered 74 – and five of those famously came against Norwich at the Amex. How was that for exciting, Jake?

Had the Albion come into the Premier League in 2017-18 and tried to continue playing in the same way that they had in the Championship, chances are we wouldn’t have survived.

From the moment promotion was secured, Hughton was aware he’d need to change the Brighton way. That’s why the Albion’s first signing as a top flight club was Pascal Gross, a genuine number 10 who would allow a switch from an open 4-4-2 to a more compact 4-4-1-1.

Norwich meanwhile have come into the Premier League and tried to be the same side who won promotion last year. Look where it’s got them – okay, so they defeated Manchester City at Carrow Road but other than that, they’ve only beaten Newcastle United and are deep in trouble.

Daniel Farke and his players haven’t adapted. They are playing in a set up that works when a team dominates matches; when they don’t, they struggle to have any impact on matches it already looks like they’re beginning to run out of ideas, as we saw at the Amex on Saturday, when they failed to muster a single shot on target.

Had Farke taken the Hughton approach and not been so wedded to trying to entertain, Norwich might be in a better position. They might have strengthened in the right areas and found a tactical approach that can help them to survive in the Premier League, after which they could evolve their approach to a more pleasing one.

That’s what the Albion are doing now. Phase one in staying up for a couple of years is complete. Tony Bloom decided that Hughton wasn’t the man that he wanted to lead Brighton through phase two of their establishment as a Premier League club – a decision that many of us agreed with – and so it is Graham Potter who is benefiting from the foundations laid by Hughton.

Potter himself knows that Hughton’s work has given him a strong starting point. He said as much on Match of the Day following the giddy 3-0 win away at Watford on the opening day of the season, telling Gary Lineker and co that it was a relatively easy job to come into because of what had been done by the previous manager.

That isn’t to take anything away from Potter as he deserves all the praise that is he getting. We’ve been a joy to watch at times this season and the future looks so bright. But without Hughton and his pragmatic approach, there wouldn’t be anything for Potter to build upon.

And that’s the real lesson from Humphrey’s tweet. Not that the BT Sport presenter was incorrect when he pointed out that Brighton were dour last year, or that he has got a lot of egg on his face as a result – but that you can’t just stroll into the Premier League and start tearing the division up.

Hughton knew that and that’s ultimately why we’re three years into our top flight adventure and sitting pretty in eighth spot. Potterball wouldn’t be possible without Hughton’s foundations. Norwich look like they’re going to find out the hard way.