LOOK AWAY NOW – THE HOODOO VOODOO CONTINUES…
West Ham 1 Brighton 1
Hoodoo Brighton think they are?
So. The back story to the expression ‘bogey team’ goes something like this:
Bogey team: A team that always does well against another team even though it is not usually expected to. This specific topic has even recently been one for a website that likes to call itself ‘English for football’. And what is the English for football? Well, Football, I suppose. And then there is the word ‘bogey’ which can mean a grotesque conglomeration of nose mucus but can also mean an evil, bad or unlucky spirit, or even a ghost. Misbehaving children are often told by desperate parents, ‘be good or the bogeyman will get you, you little ship’.
Bogey also means something that is incredibly annoying to the point of potentially inducing a mind-numbing migraine or sudden bout of projectile vomiting. So if you assemble this vast cornucopia of meanings together into a vat of misery, you will begin to understand just what a bogey team is. To further exemplify unnecessarily, it is a team that always does strangely well against another team. A specific team. In this case, West Ham United. The name of the team that this one other team always finds hard to beat is Brighton and Hove Albion. And when we say hard to beat, they actually haven’t ever beaten them. At least not in the Premier League, and certainly never at the Amex Stadium or London Stadium. Until the time they do. And is that going to be tonight? Brighton haven’t won any of their last nine games. Though they have actually drawn seven of them. So it depends on your take about what represents a bad run for any team. Two defeats in nine, or no victories in nine? Do you see my point. It’s all a case of perspective, really.
I consider this perspective as the match events unfold to the extent that when Tomas Souček flicks in a header from a Fornals’ corner inside five minutes to put the home side ahead, I delay any reaction that could be construed as personal excitement. Even when Pablo Fornals hits the underside of the crossbar halfway through the half, and when Brighton bring on so many substitutes early in the game that they find themselves down to ten men when Lallana is injured with eight minutes left. And then they do what only Brighton could with a lesser number, they score. And it’s our old friend Neil Maupay who acrobatically slots home with less than a minute left of normal time. There was also the ‘joy’ of a VAR disallowed goal from Antonio. In truth it was probably the only thing he did in the game, and he ended turning what would have been a Shane Duffy ‘own goal’ into something VAR could disallow by getting in the way of it on the line in an offside position, when it had been on its way into the net. That’s if he touched it, which looks a moot point on the replay. Ah well. Who can you do?
1 Lucasz Fabiański, 4 Kurt Zouma, 31 Ben Johnson, 5 Vladimir Coufal, 41 Declan Rice (c), 15 Craig Dawson, 28 Tomas Souček,, 8 Pablo Fornals, 9 Michail Antonio, 22 Saïd Benrahma, 20 Jarrod Bowen
Substitutes: 10 Manuel Lanzini, 23 Arthur Masuaku
Goalscorer: Tomas Souček
Denied Goalscorer: Shane Duffy (own goal)
