Match Review: Brighton 2-2 Wolverhampton Wanderers
What is Potterball? Four months into the reinvention of Brighton as a Premier League team and we’re beginning to get some sort of idea.
Potterball is a philosophy of keeping the ball. It’s possession football, no matter where you are on the pitch. Sometimes, we’ll string together beautiful passing moves. We’ll dominate the possession stats against Liverpool, Arsenal, Manchester United and Chelsea.
But other times, that can lead to overplaying. There will be bad passes in stupid positions which gift other teams opportunities and ultimately, goals.
The crowd at the Amex will groan as Maty Ryan and Adam Webster get themselves into a right mess; Graham Potter will stand in the technical area with his hands above his head, applauding their attempts.
Potterball is attacking football. We’ll sweep from one end to the other with incise play, looking to hurt the opposition as much as possible. Give Potter’s Brighton an inch going forward and they’ll try and take a yard. Why win 2-1 when you can win 3-1?
There’s a little bit of naivety to Potterball, too. Play the Potter way for 85 minutes by all means, but when you can see out a game then you are allowed to deviate from what you believe in. Kicking a ball into touch rather than going on the attack in injury time when you’re holding onto something isn’t a crime.
In many ways, Wolverhampton Wanderers’ visit to the Amex was Potterball in a nutshell. Brighton scored two devastating goals in the space of 96 seconds which had a team as good as Wolves looking more startled than Boris Johnson at the prospect of being interviewed by Andrew Neil.
That was the positive face of Potterball. Either side of those two goals we were treated to the negative face of Potterball. Wolves were gifted an opener and an equaliser thanks to some seriously suspect defending and some criminally sloppy play around the edge of our own box.
The damage wasn’t done there. In the final seconds, sensible game management would have seen the Albion smash the ball into touch to preserve a point.
They didn’t, Wolves broke and Dale Stephens had to commit a foul on the edge of the box. Stephens received a booking for his troubles and as a result now misses next week’s trip to Crystal Palace.
The most crucial component of Potterball will be absent for the first time this season at Selhurst bloody Park of all places. Let’s just hope we don’t find out just how important Stephens is to Brighton’s new style of play the hard way in Croydon in eight days time.
All four of the goals arrived in 16 breathless first half minutes. Wolves opened the scoring with a devastating counter attacking move just before the half hour mark, Diego Jota and Raul Jimenez pulling Steve Alzate, Stephens and Webster all over the place before Jota side footed past Ryan for 1-0.
Ryan had already made one fine save from Romain Saiss but even better was to come from the Socceroo when he denied Jota from a one-on-one just four minutes after Wolves had gone ahead.
Had the visitors doubled their advantage there, you suspect it would have been curtains for the Albion. The importance of Ryan’s stop was highlighted as within two minutes, the Albion went from nearly being 2-0 behind to taking a 2-1 lead.
A wonderful 60 yard pass up the pitch gave Neal Maupay a sight of goal and to the surprise of everyone at the Amex, not least Rui Patricio, the French striker took the shot on early, lashing a volley past Patricio and in for 1-1.
Wolves restarted the game but straight from kick off, Brighton regained possession. If the first goal was route one, then the second was a joy to watch as Aaron Mooy and Leandro Trossard linked up intricately down the left with Trossard’s cross being met a perfectly placed header from Davy Propper.
That was Propper’s first home goal since joining the Albion from PSV Eindhoven for £9m in the summer of 2017. Sadly for the handsome Dutchman, he undid all his good work just eight minutes later with a blind pass on the edge of his own penalty area.
To be fair to Propper, he did have Webster pointing and bellowing to him to play it to the right. Quite why Webster thought this was a good idea with Jonny quite clearly ready and waiting to intercept we’ll probably never know, but predictably Propper’s pass went straight to the Wolves full back who teed up Jota for his second of the afternoon.
Blink and you’ve have missed it, or in the case of the bloke sitting a few rows in front of us, go for a piss which lasts 10 minutes and you’ll have missed it.
Needless to say, the second half couldn’t live up to that and neither Ryan nor Patricio had a save of any note to make. Stephens’ late yellow card and what it means for Palace away was the main talking point, although Potter did hand Alireza Jahanbakhsh his first Premier League minutes of the season. Sadly, Jahanbakhsh still looks like somebody who has won a cornflake competition to become a professional footballer.
The draw was ultimately the right result and amid all the disappointment at the manner in which we gave Wolves two goals, it shouldn’t be forgotten just what a quality outfit Nuno’s side are.
They arrived at the Amex unbeaten in 10, sixth in the Premier League and with progress to the knockout stages of the Europa League already guaranteed.
Four points from fixtures against them and Arsenal in the space of three days is the sort of return we’d have bitten your hand off for at the start of the season – especially in a division so tight.
Potter and his players now have eight days off to prepare for the big one. It’s hard to imagine that Palace will be anywhere near as bad as they were last season when the Albion deservedly took six points from them.
That means it won’t be an easy night at Selhurst. For the sake of all our sanity, let us hope it’s only the positive faces of Potterball that are on show.
