Cheers, Hilary

I won't bore those of you not interested in the so far magnificent achievements of my three-points-clear-at-the-top team after last night's battling victory over Brentford, because something interesting in the programme caught my attention.

A local resident, a Mrs Hilary Ball (oddly appropriately), had taken the trouble of writing to the club to congratulate our fans on their behaviour during our ludicrously drawn-out tenure at Withdean. She wrote, "I had visions of beer bottles, cans and all sorts of rubbish dumped in the front garden, maybe windows smashed if a visiting team lost..." (No need to worry on that score most weeks...) "...and not being able to park outside my own house. I'm pleased to say none of this happened."

This is mainly due to the fact that, since a team of supporters volunteers to do a litter-pick in the area round the stadium after every home game, the area is actually cleaner after we play each match than before kick-off. It's one of the countless arrangements we had to come up with to get permission to play there in the first place. Her letter was in stark contrast to some of the other residents who must think we're no less than the spawn of Satan, as my own experience once showed.

I was walking the route from Preson Park station to the ground, an unpaved, muddy path through woods at the back of a line of private residences, on my way to a home game a couple of seasons ago, when a resident happened to come out of his garden to collect an empty cardboard beer crate that somebody had thoughtlessly dumped in the lane. Spotting my Brighton shirt, he gave me what can only be described as the skunk eye and muttered about 'hooligans dumping rubbish outside his house' in my direction. This could not go unchallenged, of course. I asked him why he was addressing his complaint at me, since I was clearly not the person who'd dumped the box. Again his eyes went to my shirt. That was all I needed to know.

The shirt had weighed, measured and found me wanting in his eyes. More than that, simply because I had the shirt of my football club on, he clearly viewed me as not only exactly the same as the dick who'd dumped the box outside his house, but somehow personally responsible for it. I told him, politely, that a shirt does not a boor make, that whoever dumped the box would be a dick whether they sported a football shirt or not. Whether they ever even watched football or not, in fact. But this clearly didn't fit with his preconception of the shaven-headed, drunken, inarticulate, snarling wretch that is doubtless his exemplar of fans everywhere, so back into his house he went, huffing and puffing.

So as we near the end of our tenure there, I hope that fans and local residents have learned something about each other. We're not all mindless hoolies, and they don't all hate us. Mrs Ball even complimented the new stadium blossoming on the hillside in Falmer, saying, "It will be a magnificent building when it is finished and a huge asset to the city. I might even be tempted to come and watch my first professional football match when you move."

Good on you, Mrs B. Glad we've been good tenants. Unfortunately though, should we leave Withdean this season with some silverware, Mr Beer Box will doubtless assume we've nicked it.

And I thought I was negative...

So a tight and, by all accounts, unfortunate defeat away at Sheffield Wednesday, one of the teams most fancied to challenge for this season's title. Not good enough for some of our fans who clearly seem to think it's vital to be top of the table in the first month of the season. There's a thread on Northstandchat in which the author claims we should 'write off the season' and that our squad lacks depth and 'we won't challenge with a bench like that'. Well do me a favour. When I was a kid, you never even saw a league table until six games in, and even then you got a quick look at the top six, nobody took them too seriously. But now in the new era of instant gratification and shortening attention spans, success and failure must be weighed and measured immediately.

Well, not for me. It's utterly, utterly ludicrous to make any comment whatsoever about the entire season in August, for God's sake. AUGUST! There are nine months ahead of us. A transfer window, yet to open because the current one hasn't even closed yet, dozens of managerial changes, injuries, suspensions, who knows what drama to be played out yet, but some soothsayer within the Brighton support is sufficiently prescient to make a declaration on the season already? I'd venture a guess that this 'sage' is in his early 20s at the absolute oldest, and his jaundiced view is just another symptom of the culture of immediacy that surrounds us now (it's all the fault of mobile phones, I tell you...)

I might run a book on when the first call for Poyet's head is made, in the likely event that we're not 20 points clear at the top by Christmas, with over 100 goals scored already and Barcelona knocking on our doors with desperate bids to prize our footballing super-Gods from the ostentatious luxury of Withdean to the prosaic functionality of the Nou Camp in the January transfer window. Some people would do well to remember that it's not a bloody computer game.

Baz in boots

My first game of the new season yesterday, a friendly with Aberdeen and a day spent in the company of Aberdonian mates down for the day. Well, what a pleasant surprise - we outplayed them from the start, kept the ball on the floor as promised by Gus, and generally looked encouraging. Another screamer from Bennett, he doesn't score tap-ins, as they say, and a good time had by all. Apart from over 500 Aberdeen fans I suspect, a superb turn-out, they deserved better. I don't know if their side are any indication of an utter paucity of quality in the SPL, or if they simply didn't take it seriously, or what the problem with them was, but it could have been a cricket score.

We missed an absolute hatful of chances, which should worry me I suspect, but the truth is, if we finish 12th this season but play football like that all year, I'll be happy. We won't, of course, be allowed to play football like that all year. League One teams will close you down in three tenths of a second and kick anybody trying any fancy stuff up in the air at the first opportunity. But it'll be nice watching a team try to play football of a purity and fluidity which is often sadly lacking in England.

I am a bit worried for the oddly-prosaically named Argentinian new signing, 'Baz', who came on as a sub, sporting bright yellow boots, and proceeded to twice connect with bicycle-kick volleys which would no doubt have screamed into the net, setting it aflame, had they not both been blocked immediately. The germane point here is that he connected with them in the first place. If he thinks there's any place in League One for that kind of outrageous exhibition of technical abilities he'll be disavowed of such delusions pretty quickly by some of the more, er, 'agricultural' players in the division.

It's nice to feel so encouraged going into what will, praise be, be the last season at Withdean. As is always the case, and as I said I'd be guilty of falling victim to in an earlier post, the depression and rancour of the English World Cup failure is dissipating rapidly as the optimism and enthusiasm for the new campaign takes over.

Bring it on!

We've gotta get outta this place

I wrote the piece below mid 2008/9 season, when we were struggling hugely under Russell Slade and looked doomed to the drop to League Two. Since then, things have improved dramatically and we now know the theoretical final ever opponents at Withdean, play-offs and construction delays notwithstanding. So while the mood of Brighton fans may be considerably more optimistic than it was when I wrote it, the sentiment remains - with Falmer now the most exciting building site I've ever seen, we can't wait to get out of Withdean.

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There was a time, during the back-to-back championships of Leagues Two and One, when Brighton fans almost came to love Withdean. ‘The’ Withdean as it’s mistakenly been called by so many, became a fortress during seasons 2000-2001 and 2001-2002. Just 3 league games were lost in that heady two year period in the Albion’s temporary home, as they charged from the nadir of consecutive near relegations to the Conference, to the nosebleed heights of the Championship.

Conventional wisdom had it that opposing teams did not like the cramped, austere Portakabin changing rooms, the open nature of the ground with no stands behind either goal, and the weird continental style running track around the pitch. Whatever it was, 112 points out of a possible 138 at home over those two seasons meant most fans, at least temporarily, were happy to be there. It wasn’t the Goldstone of course, but it would do, as long as the protracted planning process for the new stadium at Falmer at least crawled forwards.

A different story now though. The progressing construction work on the new stadium is finally a reality, though now the enormous hole in the ground where the stadium will sit seems almost to mock the faithful, the impressive CGIs a tantalising vision of what’s in store in the future, providing of course their faith can survive the stringent test that the team, and Withdean, seem intent on putting them through.

Just four home wins so far this season have seen the team slip seemingly inexorably into the relegation mire, the prospect of League Two football, and its dreaded trapdoor out of the league, a reality again. The team simply can’t win home games, no matter how hard the players try, no matter what combinations of loanees, different formations, new signings, new managers even, have a go at turning a disastrous season round.

And how sick the fans are of the stadium now. This season’s home wins tally is by no means unique. Two seasons ago, the club would have been relegated but for their excellent away record, nine away wins compensating for a paltry five wins at Withdean. Dean Wilkins seemed to have cured the home sickness with an improved return the following season,
12 home wins leaving the team just short of the play-offs. Whatever Wilkins did to improve things at home, his unexpected departure and the Messianic return of Mickey Adams quickly brought a return to form; bad form. Adams departed quickly, and his successor Russell Slade has so far seen his charges win only one of the home games he’s presided over.

Fans’ patience has all but expired with this strange, lopsided, largely uncovered and acoustically poor mish-mash of temporary seating, temporary buildings and temporary ambience. The fans don’t want to be there, the local residents don’t want them there, the members of the sports club which occupied the stadium long before the football club did, don’t want them there.

Albion are due to move into the Community Stadium at Falmer in 2011. Even though many fans will still only believe it when they see the team run out for the curtain-raiser, and the fact that increasingly there’s a chance they may do so as a League Two team, those glorious days of expecting the team to win at Withdean as they stormed to those two titles seems a very, very long way away. Falmer can’t come soon enough.