Saturday 29 July 2017

The Blue and White 'Un - July 28th 2017


Saturday July 22nd
Albion, it is sometimes proclaimed, lift moods when skies darken. Rarely has there been a more literal realisation of that yearning chant than today. With apocalyptic skies shooting down waves of rain, Solly March barely gives Albion fans the chance to negotiate Crawley’s overwhelmed commercial operation (why offer tickets on the turnstiles when you can make everyone squeeze through a phone box-sized ticket office?) before side-footing Albion into the lead in their first domestic encounter of pre-season.

More than half the crowd are in the away end to watch a collective stroll comparable to Warren Aspinall’s ambling appearances ensue: there’s impressive Ingolstadt ingratiation as the least recognisable pair in the starting line-up, Markus Suttner and Pascal Gross – both, helpfully, with short dark hair, harking back to the Gus days, when all the players shared one clipper length – combine for the midfielder to score the second.

Reading unbound Tomer Hemed and flying Scotsman Jamie Murphy repeat their feats of Dusseldorf the previous week to make it 4-0 at half-time, before Connor Goldson (hooray!) heads in from a corner and Glenn Murray scores a penalty to underline his disdain for a foul on him by Kaby Djalo, a man so short he makes Mathew Ryan, who might as well have spent the entire game watching Neighbours repeats, seem a giant.

“Maty didn’t get so much work today,” says Daddy Hoo, who was presumably unimpressed at the reaction of the lesser-spotted Kaz LuaLua to one nasty foul, emitting steam from the winger’s ears and a shove for his marker. “We played really well, particularly in the first half. The three that we’ve signed have all settled in really well, particularly Pascal. If you are able to bring players in early, they can adjust to the patterns that we have. I’ve been involved in not particularly good pre-seasons when teams have not started the season particularly well. We know that we’re going into a league now where we’re gonna be tested more than we’ve ever been tested before.”

With no sign of a striker yet, the gaffer confirms he’s treating North Stand Chat like a volcanic spud. “You are never close until something’s done – that’s the way the market is. This has been the biggest jump in the market for many years. Looking at some of the speculation, it’s difficult for a promoted side that are not used to those type of levels.”

Sunday July 23th
Scratchy times for Hope Powell, the new head coach of the Women’s team. “I started to itch,” she admits, reflecting on her time off, when the former England boss became an oracular figure for many coaches. “It’s quite nice to be given this opportunity by Brighton.” The question which rolls off the tongue is: are the Albion WSL 1 ready? “I’d rather build something than take the shortcut,” says Powell, promising to promote homegrown talent.

Monday July 24th
Remember the days when Reading would rampage in and relieve Albion of players and managers like a careless baboon removing spindly leaves from a low-hanging canopy? Rumour has it that the Royals have dug deeper into their burning pockets to try and take Hemed, upping their original £4 million bid in a move doomed to neither secure one of the only fit strikers at the Albion nor persuade the man himself (Israeli good, y’know) to drop back into the division where he proved himself last time out.

“Tomer, if anything, has come back in really good shape,” says Hoo, as if someone had accused the striker of looking a bit porky and burping out lager fumes. “The only reason for interest in our players is because they’ve done well,” he adds, exorcising Hemed’s hapless bygone spot-kick at Wolves and endearing ability to crack shots straight at visiting goalkeepers. “We’ve got two out-and-out strikers. We need everyone we’ve got.”

Tuesday July 25th
The history of kit launches is decorated with memorable moments. Just this summer, Wycombe Wanderers seemed to base an entire social media campaign around how knowingly awful their goalkeeper shirt is. Ayr United’s playboy owner arranged for semi-nude models to be painted in the colours of the club’s new strip. Only with the Albion would you have to peer at pictures from an indie gig on the other side of the world to first glimpse the colours of the latest questionable article of clothing which could be yours for 50 notes.

Ben Thatcher – the Brighton rock duo’s drummer, not the psychopathic full-back who hospitalised Pedro Mendes with a swing of his studs – is pictured wearing what looks suspiciously like a green-and-white cricket top for a gig in Oz, but turns out to be Albion’s third (sorry, “alternative”) colours for the tilt at earning a non-embarrassing points total in the Richest League in the World. It’s not meant to officially launch until Thursday – perhaps it’s all a pleasingly elaborate hoax, and the actual design of the home shirt will also include sleeves which appear to relate to the rest of the shirt.

Who cares? Albion sign a player! And a (sort of, though not very prolific) striker! Isaiah Brown, or Izzy, as we’ll call him, cos he’s our mate, joins from Chelsea, turning down another loan at ‘uddersfield, where he managed four goals in 15 last season, as well as the miss of the season in the Play-Off Final.

Olly Norwood’s finest moment for Albion might remain being paraded shoulders-high down Queen’s Road by hammered fans in the unbelievable promotion aftermath in the city centre. Turns out he craved Craven Cottage. “Once I knew of the interest, I was desperate to get it done,” he says, remaking upon the conclusion of his long-mooted loan to Fulham. “The football Fulham have played suits my style.”

Chrissy Hoo wasn’t expecting the blue and white marvels to enjoy as much “balance of the ball” as they had at Crawley, but they again fly out of the traps like a whippet poked in the nads in the latest warm-up game, at Sarfend. Izzy plays an hour but Molly Starch is the man again, scoring two lovely goals before Glenn gets in on the act (another Suttner assist) for a 3-0 half-time lead which never gets added to. “I thought the grass was very long tonight, which changes the type of game,” observes Hughton, echoing some fans’ concern with the continuing length of his facial hair. “Little bit disappointing, that.” The grass theme continues. “It was really sticky and really slow,” adds Big German Uwe Hunemeier. “We tried to move the ball quickly and scored three really nice goals.”

Wednesday July 26th
Yellow. It’s a brave colour to wear even if you’re built like a professional athlete. The club instructs the players to feign moodiness in the photoshoot for the new away shirt, but they end up looking like they’ve just sniffed a particularly rancid guff or been subjected to a facial smattering with a freshly-caught kipper, adding to the underwhelming sense of wearing a Wallabies shirt when you’re a football team.

Still, we’ll all probably be trying to dig our way to Australia by the end of the Man City game, and it’s (arguably) not as bad as the orange and black one – nor, for all its novelty value, the pink one. Is it even yellow? Is it mustard? That, friends, is university gold – quite a choice of words, it has to be said, considering the quality of some of the online posts from its earliest buyers. Or, indeed, Dale Stephens. “Oooh your hard”, he tweets to Murph, upping the bantz after spotting the Scotsman’s hammy attempt at a thousand-yard stare. “Izzy can play on either flank, but we know he can off the front as well,” Hoo says, enamoured with the versatility of his new signing. “I see him as one that is going to play off a front man or in a wide area.” That’s just as well, because the French firebomb remains doubtful for the start of the season, and Baldock’s still crocked.

Thursday July 27th
Closer inspection of the new kits, which are momentarily available in most sizes at boutique shopping destination the Seagulls Superstore, reveals the unswerving generosity of the club and Nike: the home number combines three shirts for the price of one, stitching sleeves and a bottom swathe of the shirt onto a central design which appears to be only distantly related to its accompanying fabrics.

Izzy’s former Chelsea coach, Dermot Drummy, offers a restrained reference which puts the young winger/striker/saviour under no pressure. “I saw him as a mini-Drogba,” offers Drummy, who adds that Richie Towell is “nothing less than a cross between Pele at his peak and a significantly more visionary Cruyff.” “He’s like Romelu Lukaku,” Drummy concludes of Albion’s expectation-bearer. “He is humble, he is hard-working and he wants to learn.”

Man City stuff Champions League holders Real Madrid 4-1 in Los Angeles, and the hierarchies on either side reach an agreement not to spend 180 million Euros on 18-year-old Monaco striker Kylian Mbappe – a fee they mutually decide, much in the manner of rich schoolkids dithering over a Chomp bar, is “exorbitant”. The second game of the season cannot come fast enough, even if Tony Bloom is shuffling his cards, chuckling bemusedly.

Friday July 28th
Time was when you could have paid on the gate, laid across several seats and had the refreshments kiosk pretty much to yourself on a visit to Vicarage Road with the mighty blue and white angels. This time, Watford away sells out the minute the second batch of tickets go on sale. Izzy’ll be there, eating a cucumber. “When the League games come along I'll still be eating them, definitely, three little circles of cucumber,” he says, explaining a pre-match ritual initiated when he vegged-in a hat-trick following salad advice from a Chelsea under-23 teammate, along with “don’t let John Terry meet your missus”. “It's crazy but ever since then it's always been on the back of my mind, so I just do it.” 

Everyone’s had that Sunday League manager who was the last person you wanted to see after a big one the previous night, and Izzy – a Hughton fan – can relate. “David [Wagner] is very energetic, always running up and down the touchline, things like that,” he says. “"I didn't think Huddersfield on a permanent was the best idea for me. I'm still young and I still believe I can play for Chelsea. The Brighton option was the best for me and hopefully it works out well."

Albion have no new injuries ahead of the trip to Naarich tomorrow, where the gaffer definitely won’t be thumbing his nose or dummy high-fiving Alex Pritchard or Delia Smith and friends.

Quote of the week: “I quite like my scar because it will always remind me of what I’ve been through. The first few days of pre-season I was still thinking about it. We did a passing drill and Dale Stephens hit one to me. It was meant to be on the floor but it came at chest height and I thought, ‘no’ and caught the ball and put it down. Now I chest the ball fine. I never feel it. It’s brilliant to be involved on the training pitch again.” – Connor Goldson becomes the first Albion player since Shane Duffy to appear topless in the national press.

Ex-Men: Contrasting fortunes for two former Albion hitmen. Chris O’Grady – now star striker at Chesterfield – nets for the second pre-season home game in a row, causing his manager, former Albion defensive target Gary Caldwell, to gush: “His all-round display was outstanding. The team are lucky they have a centre forward they can look at who is a man that leads the line, runs about, does his fair share of work defensively, but then is also a real focal point for the team.” Peterborough legend and Albion Duracell bunny Craig Mackail-Smith plays the second half for Posh in a slightly bad-tempered 1-0 defeat to Wolves. “It was a good opportunity to get himself back in the shop window,” says United boss Grant McCann. “I’m sure he will soon find himself another club.”

Friday 21 July 2017

The Blue and White 'Un - July 21st 2017


Saturday July 15th
Albion are close to netting Neto. Little more than a year after struggling to entice players destined for Norwich’s bench, the club is on the brink of its first Brazilian, who presumably senses more than a whiff of the Copacabana about Lancing, where he arrives to sign for a record-rupturing fee from Gent.

A new midfielder would be timely: “There’s no point in thinking the worst,” soothes the Hughmeister, trying to ignore the idea of being relegated by November if the injury Anthony Knockaert sustained the previous night, in a 2-0 win against Fortuna Dusseldorf in Austria, turns out to be as much of a Knockaert blow as the case AK’s foot is now enshrined in suggests.

Hughton sounds an admirably restrained analysis of the game which, you suspect, likely diametrically opposes his annoyance during the match itself. "There were some tackles flying in that could have been deemed as reckless challenges,” he concludes with typical diplomacy.

“But these are the things that you have to be able to cope with.” Probably not in the first friendly back against a team in the German second tier, mind.

Sunday July 16th
The net result is we’ve net got Neto. Turns out one of the Brazil-via-Belgium budget-buster’s knees is as reliable as a toothpick in a swordfight. The club, in characteristic “we don’t comment on speculation” style, say nothing, but the player’s agent is believed to have left Lancing in a sweary flurry, furiously waving a photo of Paul Kitson in Albion colours.

Neto could find solace in the Instagram advice offered by one midfielder who almost definitely is incoming: Mathias Normann, Fotballspiller and proponent of the phrase “you have to fight through the bad days in order to earn the best days”. Normann's a Norwegian from Bodø/Glimt, a second tier side whose supporters occasionally demonstrate their loyalty by carrying giant yellow toothbrushes into games.

Will he clean up or merely become another flossed soul among the myriad promising spillers to have never emerged from the development squad? There’s Norway of knowing, really.

Monday July 17th
Not content with being massively better at defending than the average chump, Connor Goldson also had a slightly bigger aorta than most people, he reveals.

In easily the best news we could have wished for on a Monday, the most indie-dressing member of the Albion squad reflects on the operation which, essentially, saw his chest carved open in an operation ending any risk of the 24-year-old facing serious heart problems.

“I thought the world had ended,” he admits, speaking of the day in the middle of last season when he was told about the defect. “If something did happen you wouldn’t be able to tell what was going on and it would have been death straight away on a football pitch.” A long and promising career lies in wait.

Jamie Murphy, scorer of Albion’s opener against Fortuna following his recall to the Scotland squad, is linked with Fulham. Ticket sales for the only pre-season friendly at the Theatre of Broken Dreams, against Atletico Madrid, have topped 23,000, the club announces.

Tuesday July 18th
Tickets for Albion’s first away game, at Leicester in mid-August, go on sale to the privileged mob deemed to have accrued sufficient points under the terms of the club’s faintly mystifying new loyalty points system.

In scenes not witnessed since tickets for Bury away went up for grabs in 2001, the online queueing technology informs some fans there are more than 1,000 fans in front of them in the queue, evoking memories of Mark McGhee shimmying around the snaking lines shirking work in pursuit of a golden ticket to the Millennium Stadium all those moons ago.

A club spokesman laughs at rumours that the system could be altered to restrict tickets to fans who can pass a basic grammar test and resist tweeting to announce the news within seconds of blowing their moolah on a ticket.

“To get the balls out on the first day is a big thing,” Jamie Murphy announces to the official website, playing a magnificent round of innuendo bingo while discussing the joys of pre-season training.

Wednesday July 19th
“It will be good to test ourselves against the best players in the country and the world,” says Dale Stephens, yet again clearly referencing Burnley, his dreams of finally sidling up to Sean Dyche materialising a year later than he would have liked. “You look at Burnley and Bournemouth – they’ve kept the core of the squad that got them there. It will be nice to see everybody get a chance to play at this level.”

Bam Baldock is sidelined with what is expected to be a short-term calf injury, and two former Albion right-backs – one more legendary than the other – are united in the most unexpected of places.

“I am sure the Indian players will get to learn a lot from him,” says boss John Gregory, who has gone a long way from Crawley to the managerial hotseat at Super League club Chennaiyin, where his opening video message to the fans managed to be marginally more awkward than Bobby Zamora’s “I’m back” broadcast. The new signing he is referring to, naturally, is king among mortals Inigo Calderon.

The Albion club shop staff are no strangers to such exoticism, having apparently processed demand from New Zealand and Qatar among a record-breaking round of orders for the staggeringly beautiful, modestly-priced new home shirt.

In a major coup for the Albion, Hope Powell, who spent 15 years as England manager, will lead the women's challenge for promotion to Super League 1. “Shows our intent going forward,” tweets captain Sophie Perry, who’ll hope Powell is less perturbed by managing at Withdean than the last former England boss to lead Albion there, Peter Taylor. “We mean business.”

Thursday July 20th
Mathias Normann’s chiselled cheekbones and solid six-pack make the brickwork at Falmer appear relatively unsculpted as the midfielder poses outside everyone’s favourite spaceship stadium, having signed a three-year deal.

A youth-teamer for Norway, he’s immediately given the proverbial kiss of death by Chrissy Hugh, who pronounces him the 500th development squad player with a long-term goal of reaching the first team. Or heading straight back from whence he came.

Knockaert, who has been pictured hobbling around on crutches, has a chance of making the heroic opening day defeat to Man City, although he’s reported to be “utterly crestfallen” at missing Saturday's big one at the Checkatrade.com stadium in Crawley, where Aussie custodian Matty Ryan is expected to make his debut.

Knockaert will have to sit and watch the mercurial magic of former Withdean heartthrob and pool-playing firecracker Dean Cox, who lavishes praise upon Crawley’s pre-season thus far by telling The Argus that new boss Harry Kewell has been “trying to get his ideas across” alongside a lot of “hard running”.

Another mysterious next-best thing, Luis García, departs the developmental merry-go-round for Seville, taking with him a set of tracksuits branded with his own logo and the usual sense of enigmatic, Ali Dia-style regret/relief.

Friday July 21st
Call the cops, dust off your Sussex Senior Cup blu-ray showreel, set the satnav to negotiate innumerable grey roundabouts – it’s almost time for the big one at the Checkatrade.com Coliseum.

Championship scouts are evidently eyeing up Albion’s pre-season friendlies, because Murph’s fellow scorer in the tussle with Dusseldorf, Tomer Hemed, is also the subject of a transfer bid: Reading offer £4 million.

“We need to keep working hard and improve in every game so that we are ready for that first game of the season against Manchester City,” he responds, calling the Crawley clash a chance to “get used to the type of football the gaffer wants us to play.”

Given that HemHem and Glenn are the only fit current options upfront, that plan could conceivably involve a back six. “We have new players coming into the squad, but they have all integrated very well and have been made really welcome by us all,” says Hemed, reflecting on the imminent loan move of our new Norwegian.

“I’d rather exfoliate my beautiful face with an industrial grater than play at the MadStad again.”

Quote of the week: “We were sitting in his conservatory late one night and wanted a drink. Micky thought there was a keg of beer in the utility room, so we started drinking it but it was a bit warm so he told me to get some ice out of the freezer.

"I put the ice into the glasses and it started frothing up as we drank the beer. It tasted a bit odd, but we finished it and went to bed. We were sharing a bed, so Claire, who had just given birth to their son, Mitchel, could get some uninterrupted sleep – it’s a manager/assistant manager thing.

"In the morning we both felt awful and Claire burst into the room and asked, ‘Where is all the ice?’ ‘We used it in the beer,’ replied Micky. ‘That was my frozen breast milk.’

"We looked at each other and he said, ‘that’s the closest you will ever get to her breasts.’ We laughed our heads off. Claire eventually saw the funny side.” – Bob Booker on life as assistant to mini-marvel Micky Adams. The autobiography, Ooh-Ah Bob Booker, is expected to be published in August.