Preview Percy is full of festive cheer. Well, no he isn’t. It’s just that if we told you just how grumpy he gets at this time of year you really wouldn’t believe us. Here’s his traditional load of bah-humbug on the subject of this weekend’s visit of Brighton...
Next up we play host to Brighton And Hove Albion at the Olympic. Kick-off on Saturday is at the splendid hour of 3pm on Saturday. Hurrah. Anyone coming in from the north of this great metropolis of ours on the Thameslink routes through Luton into St Pancras will find a large bridge-shaped gap in the line in the Harpenden area. Looks a good one to give a swerve.
So Brighton, to give them their full name, then. Bit of an odd season for them so far. The results matrix that I use on this laptop to identify sequences (green for a win. yellow for a draw red for defeat – quite clever really) looks a bit like a patchwork quilt or, perhaps a slightly mouldy Battenberg cake.
Three times they have strung two wins together only to find the following few games turn into a mixture of yellow and red. This is exemplified by their last six. They beat Man City 2-1 at home and this was followed up with a win at Bournemouth by the same score. At that point they found themselves in fifth spot.
However they followed this up with a 1-1 draw at home to Southampton – a result that may see managers sacked at other clubs. A 3-1 defeat at Fulham was followed up with a 2-2 draw at Leicester. Most annoying for them would have been Sunday’s 3-1 home defeat to Palace in the world’s most pointless so-called “derby”. All of which has seen them drop from that fifth spot to ninth, with 25 points from 16 played.
As you might imagine from a club that has an data analysis-based operating model, they brought in a fair number over the summer. Much to Daisy’s displeasure, though she wrote off writing much about £16m winger Ibrahim Osman whose arrival from Danish outfit Nordsjaelland lasted just long enough for him to be loaned to Feyenoord for the season.
This was an experience with which right winger Yankuba Minteh is familiar. Although the Gambian joined Newcastle last season, he too was immediately shipped out to the Rotterdam outfit for the duration, scoring a pair and providing a couple of assists in the 6-0 thrashing of Ajax.
Minteh (insert your own joke about toothpaste here) arrived for a fee of £30m which will have pleased the Geordie accountants and profit and sustainability watchdogs, the fee representing a cool £27m profit on a player who didn’t make an appearance for the Magpies.
Feyenoord loom heavily in Brighton’s dealings this summer. The €30m paid by Brighton for Mats Wieffer is Feyenoord’s record transfer fee received. A defensive midfielder by trade, he has gained 12 Dutch caps and is described as the “breaker-up” in their midfield in the same mould as their former player MacAllister.
Daisy seemed mightily amused by the fact that the player was born in Borne, a fact which may or may not be linked to the alarming rate at which our stock of Christmas brandy seems to be diminishing.
As far as Daisy can tell, attacking midfielder Brajan Gruda has no connection with Feyenoord at all. This didn’t stop the Seagulls from shelling out £25m for the German Under 21 international who arrived from Mainz. No full caps yet though he has trained with the senior squad, most notably in the runup to Euro 2024, though a calf injury precluded any further thoughts of his making the full squad for the tournament.
Attacking assets were further enhanced by the arrival of French U21 cap Georginio Rutter, who arrived from Leeds for a cool £40m. Rutter made the Championship team of the season last term and has netted twice in 15 appearances for Brighton this term.
Matt O’Riley is an interesting one. Born in Hounslow he started off at Fulham and started to slide down the leagues, firstly to Milton Keynes Dons then to the oxymoron that is Scottish football where he spent a couple of seasons with Celtic, scoring 25 goals in 95 league appearances before the Seagulls spent £25m on him this summer.
So with a name like O’Riley and a stint with Celtic under his belt it came as no surprise that the midfielder’s international background lies outside the England of his birth. However, given those circumstances it would have been a brave man to bet on his senior caps being of the Danish variety, his mother’s side of the family all hailing from the land of Lurpack.
He was controversially left out of the Danish Euro 24 squad with boss Hjulmand explaining why the six other midfielders selected ahead of him were worth their place. Thereby avoiding the diplomatic trap of saying what everyone was thinking, namely “yeah he’s had a good season but he’s only playing in Scotland”.
Dutch born Turkish international utility player Ferdi Kadioglu arrived from Fenerbahce for £29m increasing to £33m with potential add-ons. He’s another who did well at age-level for one country before hitting a wall when it came to selection for the full Dutch national side, whereupon he switched allegiance to Turkey. If someone could not tell Konstantinos Mavropanos we might be spared another free-kick.
Their little black box or whatever it is they use to produce players from around the globe came up with the name of Diego Gomez, which up to now everyone had thought was that island in the Indian Ocean with the US Airbase that everyone has been harping on about of late.
No? Just me then. Gomez is a Paraguayan midfielder who came in from Inter Miami for about £14m and recently scored his first international goal which was a bit useful – it being the winner in their World Cup Qualifyer against Brazil.
And on to the Wild and Wacky World of Association Football. And this week is one of those occasions where our opponents feature. It seems that the Seagulls have sent out legal letters to Croatian third-division side Jadran-Galeb whose club badge is basically Brighton’s with the words Brighton & Hove Albion removed and replaced by NK Jadran-Galeb.
Those of us who love a good courtroom drama will be disappointed by the Croatians’ meek agreement to come up with another design. Meanwhile rumours that an Albanian twelfth tier side have written to Tottenham asking them to stop using their pigeon on a beach ball badge because of the damage caused to the Albanians’ reputation are of course very silly.
And so to us. That was a creditable point gained on Monday, in my opinion. We were the better side before the interval, they were after but we looked dangerous on the break. The penalty was a penalty. The free-kick equaliser was superb even if its award was annoying. Doubly so given that, up to that point, Mavopanos had had one of his better games for us.
Someone needs to tell him that being Greek doesn’t mean he has to kick everything Turkish. Fullkrug got into some good positions and on another, less ring rusty day might easily have got a couple. Maybe, just maybe...
It was good to see the youngsters get some pitch time at the end. Casey, and in particular Scarles – who had a few minutes longer on the pitch – acquitted themselves well. One must assume that they have been showing good progress behind the scenes to the extent that they were deemed sufficiently trustworthy to help see the game out. All in all, a good night’s work in my opinion.
On the absentee list, in addition to Micky, Soler, who has in recent weeks shown signs of actually being a not bad player picked up a deserved yellow on Monday night which was his fifth of the season. No complaints about the yellow itself which was for a Liverpool foul (breaking up play on the halfway line).
However one does wonder why the cynical hack on the lively Kudus early on escaped similar sanction. I must have been off sick when they announced that law about yellow cards not being awarded in the first 20 seconds of a match. Emerson returns from his suspension which I suspect will mean a return to the bench for Coufal and a swap of wings for Wan-Bissaka. Todibo is a doubt with a “tight groin”. Everyone else is available.
So on to the prediction then. Tight one this and I wouldn’t rule out another draw. But, on the whole I think we’ll have emerged from the last seven days a in better shape than them, so I will go for us to sneak a win this time. So the £2 I was going to not give to carol singers (they came round the other night saying that they would take contactless payments, for pity’s sake) will instead go on us to shade this one. Let’s call it 2-1 to us shall we, Mr Winstone?
Enjoy the game and happy whatever if you must!
When Last We Met At The Olympic: Drew 0-0 (Premier League January 2024)
The visitors had the better of what was in truth a lousy game of football. I only know this from reading later reports – frankly I had forgotten the game before I got to the end of the row on my way out.
Referee Rob Jones
Fine wines mature with age. Bananas go mouldy. Jones is definitely a banana.
Danger Man: Joao Pedro
I might have gone for Welbeck on the “always scores against us” principle but he’s out with an ankle problem. So Pedro it is by virtue of the fact that he is joint top scorer in the league with 4 in 10 appearances.
Percy and Daisy’s Brighton Fact Of The Week Type Thing
The Brighton Dome has enjoyed the best of music in its time – Pink Floyd debuted Dark Side Of the Moon there in 1972. They should have quit while they were ahead. Two years later the venue inflicted Abba on the world as the won the Eurovision Bloody Song contest. Something to consider as you have to share your DLR service with the sort of tin-eared afficionado dressed in tinsel who like to watch robots performing lousy tunes.
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