With 66 shots and one goal Brighton face striking crisis
Fear of missing has become a self-fulfilling prophesy for profligate forwards, which may doom the club to relegation
There were times last week when it felt like the only logical explanation for Brighton’s wastefulness was that the players had decided they might as well get in on the joke. Their reputation as the Premier League’s most profligate team had long been secured, their goalscoring issues apparent to the most casual onlookers, and yet still they found a way to make the problem even worse.
To miss one penalty in a crucial match against West Bromwich Albion would be typical of Brighton’s season. To miss a penalty and then an open goal was a little excessive, even for them. To then miss a second penalty, to go with everything that had gone before, was almost beyond belief.
And that is before we come to their previous game, at home to Crystal Palace. On that occasion they took 25 shots to Palace’s three, and still lost to a team who had just two touches in the Brighton penalty box. “The story of our season,” said midfielder Pascal Gross. According to the underlying statistics, Brighton would have expected to have scored 40 goals with the chances they have created this season. Their actual tally is just 26 and, in the last three matches, they have scored just one goal from 66 shots. So many points that have not been claimed.
We all know this is the case, not just because of those statistics but also because of the evidence of our own eyes. The bigger question now, after so long without the issue being fixed, is simple: why does it keep happening?
The assumption among observers will be that the problem has become psychological. It will not be that straightforward, of course, but it seems likely that at least part of the issue is in the players’ minds.
“It is never as simplistic as it looks,” says Paul Mcveigh, the former Norwich City and Northern Ireland striker who is now a keynote speaker in performance psychology.
What is clear, though, is that the more the players become aware of the issue, the more it plays on their minds and the more likely it is to continue.
“It is how the brain naturally works,” Mcveigh says. “If they are focusing more on the fact they don’t want to miss the chance, the brain is then focusing on missing the chances. The more the player is thinking about all of the things they don’t want to happen, it is making that outcome more likely.”
Prof Andy Lane, a sports psychologist at the Centre for Health and Human Performance and the University of Wolverhampton, says a psychological solution would be to focus on recreating the feeling of scoring.
“It must be that they are overthinking it,” Lane says. “It is not coming naturally and each opportunity to score comes with overthinking the errors from previous times.
“You would get Danny Welbeck and go through his highlights on Youtube. Looking at previous successes and replaying those in your mind is a great way to recapture a positive feeling. You have to move back to when it was successful.”
One of the more interesting elements of the Brighton debate centres on the role of head coach Graham Potter and his staff. Should they take the blame? Or are the strikers simply not good enough? Opinions will vary depending on your view of the game, and how much you believe a coach can influence an individual player during a match. “There are very few coaches who are actually going to help their players on the pitch,” Mcveigh says. “Coaches are going to give them a rough shape and then once the players are on the pitch they make thousands of decisions that have nothing to do with the coaches.”
Right now, Brighton’s players are continually making the wrong decisions. They host Leicester City today knowing that it needs to change before they become the best but most wasteful team to be relegated from the Premier League.