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Everyone knows that Brighton’s football is pretty to look at, but their worrying series of results and their slide to the bottom three is the complete opposite.
The Seagulls were on top of the world after a famous win at Anfield earlier last month, but since then Graham Potter’s men have quickly returned to earth with their team now level on points with Fulham and facing a real fight for survival.
It wasn’t long ago that Brighton was comfortable at the table and seemed confident of maintaining its top-flight status – that 1-0 win at Liverpool took them ten points out of the drop zone, but three straight losses coincided with a dramatic fall. in the classification.
They sit just outside the bottom three, but only on goal difference, with their Fulham rivals looking rejuvenated under Scott Parker and preparing for a massive effort to get out of harm’s way.
Any team can lose a few games in a row, but it’s the way these defeats are playing out that worries Brighton the most. Two of them, against Crystal Palace and Leicester, came in the closing minutes, with the former scoring on the last kick of the game to secure the 2-1 victory.
All is well and good to play tidy football, something Brighton does very well with Potter, but that engaging style of play will count for nothing if they swap trips to Stamford Bridge for Stoke next season.
Potter’s men need to find that cutting edge to watch the games and win ugly, as Jamie Redknapp put it after watching his dramatic loss to Leicester last time, admitting he ‘fears’ for the team.
“They are so beautiful to see, they are a joy,” he told Sky Sports. But they have to find an ugly way to win right now, otherwise players like Fulham, chasing them and getting good results, will catch up with them.
“As a scorer, you would love to play for this team. The opportunities they create through [Alexis] Mac Allister and [Leandro] Trossard, [Pascal] Gross, they create a lot of opportunities for the forwards. ”
Redknapp is right. Potter lacks a cold striker to devour these opportunities: where would the Seagulls be sitting if he had Harry Kane or Jamie Vardy at his disposal?
Brighton ranks sixth on the expected goals chart (40.37) as shown by Opta, but when it comes to putting up chances, it’s 15th.
The stats are an agonizing read if you’re a Seagulls fan – the team has had 356 shots this season, the seventh-highest of any time, but has a shot conversion of just 7.6 percent, putting them in the spot. 18.
Brighton’s top scorer is Neal Maupay, a forward we know can be dangerous back in the day, but his seven Premier League goals alone have not been enough to carry the team forward, with his next best sniper Solly March. with only two.
That kind of upfront form just isn’t good enough to get you out of a hole and it’s part of the reason they’ve lost games by such tight margins. Their 1-0 loss to West Brom made clear their inability to seize opportunities when they missed twice from the penalty spot.
It was a game in which they had 70 percent possession on 15 shots, but came out empty-handed as West Brom scored on one of their two shots on goal. It’s nothing new.
The team has created 50 ‘great opportunities’ in the league this season, saving just 34 percent of them. Winger Leandro Trossard has been a key creative outlet, responsible for ten of them, while Adam Lallana, Alexis MacCallister and Pascal Gross also helped pull the strings in midfield.
But they only have 27 goals to prove, which alone doesn’t seem too alarming given that the Wolves, who are nine points ahead of them, have just one more goal and have conceded two more than Brighton.
It’s the good margins that are costing them, as we saw against Leicester, wasting another point after Daniel Amartey’s late goal, with Lallana accusing the team of ‘falling’ and feeling like they had ‘won at halftime’.
“We all lost a couple of percent,” he said after the game. ‘We became passive, you suffer out of possession and so they punished us in the end.
“We were poor in the second half, it almost felt like we had won the game at half time and if you lower your levels, you don’t get results in the Premier League.”
Now we’re really going to see what Potter’s men are made of before a crucial game against Southampton that he fights below. They then travel to St Mary’s before another essential home game against Newcastle.
Failing to beat those two will put them in a real pain with games against Man United, Chelsea and Everton on the horizon. Two games against Man City and Arsenal also don’t help allay fears.
And things have not been made easier without the presence of star defender Tariq Lamptey, who looks set to miss the rest of the season with a serious hamstring injury.
Lamptey has injected some real quality into the Brighton squad, but he hasn’t played since spotting the problem in December and has been forced to undergo surgery. The 20-year-old was a dangerous threat on the right back and has been greatly missed.
Now Potter is faced with the ultimate dilemma: Stand your ground and keep working on your system in hopes that the goals will start to arrive, or turn things around to stop the rot. However, the 45-year-old does not seem to believe there is an easy solution to the team’s current problems.
“It’s hard to say, ‘We will play badly and we will win,’ he said last week. ‘It’s hard to say that as a coach you want to try to improve and improve. No matter how we do it, we are all doing the same thing, which is trying to win the game .
As I understand it in football, there is no right or wrong way to do it, whether the focus is on the number of passes, whether it is a long ball, whether it is open plays, the challenges are that you have to make your choice. works.
“At the moment we are playing well, but we have not managed to convert those performances into the points we need and that is where we have to work.
“I don’t think you can say, ‘If we do this, our results are going to improve.’ It’s not as simple as that, we have to try our way and work with the players, and do something that we believe in. ‘
Brighton might believe his philosophy, but something has to change at AMEX for the next eleven games.
Source: m.allfootballapp.com
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