Albion's sparing use of Glenn Murray in the FA Cup has yielded spectacularly economical returns since he was introduced as a late substitute in the Seagulls' 2-1 win over Crystal Palace in the 3rd round of the competition in January 2018.
Murray has scored four goals in the 67 minutes he has played in the FA Cup since coming on at the Amex Stadium that night. Three of them have been vital. Murray's 87th-minute winner against Palace was similar to the quick reaction that saw him nudge in Jürgen Locadia's cross within three minutes of entering this replay to put Albion 2-1 up and settle a tricky tie against the 10-man Baggies. Murray also scored a last-minute winner at Middlesbrough in the 4th round of last season's competition, and enhanced the result for his side at The Hawthorns by adding Albion's third with three minutes to go. "It's nice to put the tie to bed," said the smiling striker, having received a pass from fellow substitute Davy Pröpper to embellish a late Albion comeback sparked by Florin Andone's clinical 82nd minute leveller. "Both sides could have done without extra-time. Florin kept us in it at the end and from there we went from strength to strength." Murray has scored four goals in his last two away games. That tally would have been five in three had he converted a straightforward chance during Albion's 2-1 defeat against Manchester United at Old Trafford last month. He will be back on home turf in the Premier League against Burnley on Saturday and for the 5th round encounter with Derby County a week later. "Derby are a good team, just like West Brom are," said Murray. "You look at the draw and there are a lot of big teams out, so it's good to be in it."
One way to ensure the race for the Championship goes down to the wire is to suffer a shock defeat when everyone expects a rollover win. An air of raucous celebration was justified before Albion’s final home game of a magnificent season. What almost no-one had considered was that the team’s brilliantly consistent run at the Amex Stadium would come to an end on the day they had the chance to win the title against visitors who had spent much of the season contemplating relegation.
It wasn’t one of the Seagulls’ finest displays, but they were far less lackluster than they had been in the 2-0 loss at Norwich eight days earlier. Albion enjoyed two-thirds of the possession, but more than a dozen shots off target led the way to an anti-climax.
The wayward shooting began during an uncharacteristically stuttering opening 15 minutes. Murray should have scored when he was allowed to chest the ball inside the box, only to hit a tame half-volley which tumbled comfortably wide. But City were more than the spectators Wigan had often been during the game which won Albion promotion, sending a number of dangerous crosses into the box and taking the lead with an excellent goal just before half-time. Matty Taylor sent Josh Brownhill clear down the right, and his cross at pace returned the favour for an easy header which left the away fans at the Amex celebrating a lead for the first time since Newcastle’s late winner more than two months earlier.
Perhaps Albion would have had it easier if their opponents had been rooted in mid-table rather than chasing their Championship status on the back of a four-game unbeaten run which included three victories. Their goal came at the perfect time, too, stifling the joyous mood around the ground. Things didn’t get much better for Albion in the second half. Jiří Skalák, who had been booked and ineffective, was replaced by Solly March, but the Young Player of the Season struggled to create many openings. Anthony Knockaert, on the other side, had repeatedly deceived his marker down the left during the first half, most notably when he allowed Gaëtan Bong to cross for a Murray header which bounced across the six yard box, just short of Tomer Hemed’s reach.
A City old boy, Sam Baldock, might have made the difference against the club he scored 24 goals in one season for if he hadn’t missed out through injury, and Murray and Uwe Hünemeier should have done much better with the sort of headers they usually bury in front of goal. Lee Johnson’s side were good value for the upset, though. Taylor was inches from scoring again after an hour, narrowly failing to connect with a half-volley from point-blank range, and only a superb save from David Stockdale, getting down quickly to stop Bobby Reid’s shot after the substitute had broken through, prevented them from winning more comfortably late on.
It was impossible not to feel disappointment, but Albion still have the chance to win the division at Aston Villa on Sunday. They will need to take their chances better than this.
It takes supernatural commitment, a kind of tenacious
faux-dependency, to purely connect to football these days. Watching
millionaires, spiritually divided from the mob by galaxies, and wondering if
they might have the motivation to somehow care, feels more like going to the
circus than fanning. Look, everyone wants the players to be as human as they
are in the PR videos (“smile, Glenn! Make eye contact!”), but the reality is
they’re a bunch of rich athletes, performing for fame and fortune, and most of
us are out of shape potatoes trying to imbue meaning into our lives through a
costly vicarious yearning.
Anyway, there are games when it becomes comfortingly
difficult to remember what a pointless form of belonging football provides, and
this – magnificent, bewildering, heroic and convoluted – was one of them. In
that way that the seasons inexorably blur into one another, it seemed like
years since Wednesday’s visit in May, their fans all ruddy and Yorkshire and
ready to drive through the night to get back to work in the morning, powered by the fumes of a
date with Wembley. Look who’s laughing now, we might have thought, if they didn’t
seem capable of throwing some witch doctor curse on Albion, like when
half the squad expired in the semi at Hillsborough.
There might, you feared,
be few better teams to extend the tame loss at Preston into consecutive nil
points, but then there is Knockaert, the epitome of a player, with all his flailing and moaning at the officials, who you’d detest if he was against
you. It’s all fine, because he can get the ball just outside the area, as he
did here from a diagonal Hemed pass as part of one of Albion’s grease lightning
breaks from their own box, and pull off an impossible balanced sprint which
perfectly keeps the ball just beyond whoever tries to stop him, ending with a
goal.
There were several elements leading up to Knocky blasting it into the roof
of the net which escalated the improbability of the goal: Norwood only just
made the clearance which provided Hemed with the ball, and then Hemed
underhit the pass, as good as it was, making Knockaert overhit his first touch. Kieren
Westwood, the Wednesday ‘keeper, thought he could rush out and gather the ball. Like
the entire stadium, he’d underestimated Knocky’s squirrel-like foot speed, and
now Knockaert was away, making three defenders dive in their own idiocy, an
unstoppable French fireball wheeling, It’s a Knockaert.
The law of the universe
dictates that, sometimes, something so brilliant in a game has to be counterbalanced
by a daft calamity. A Foristieri cross was met by the flying foot of Norwood, running
towards his own goal, to divert it onto a Dunk header – #tbt, it’s a Dunk
disaster – which sailed past the already-grounded Stockdale. The timing,
right on half-time, was horrible, but the panic didn’t really churn in until another
cross, in the 64th minute, led to a shot which caused Glenn Murray
to use his hands as a means to avoid decapitation. Technically it was a sending
off, but a penalty would have been sufficient punishment, perhaps as a nod to
the human right to avoid being knocked out cold. Still, off he went.
It was
such a dismal few seconds that you could only have surpassed the feeling of
imminent catastrophe if the goalmouth had promptly burst into flames, scorching
Knockaert’s gloves while a terrified ballboy desperately tried to extinguish it
with a bottle of Lucozade. And then Stockdale (can we call him Save-it Stopdale
from now on? Is it possible we could pun this anywhere at all?) rescued fate
from the furnace of yet another disappointment against Wednesday, first diving,
athletically, to his right to save the penalty, and then producing a follow-up
save, the other way, which could only have been more remarkable had he caught
the ball and raced down the other end to smash home in front of the North.
Nothing – sunshine, rainbows, fivers falling from the sky – would have been a
surprise at this point. Albion were a man down but with their tails up – Murray
had been relatively quiet, and all the momentum was theirs. Pocognoli has
hardly played this season, but his cross, a glistening arc of solid gold
assist, swung beautifully for Knockaert, diving in at the far post, unleashing
delirium.
Wednesday, understandably, completely lost their heads at this point,
like in Sunday League when you’re knackered and losing agonisingly and
bristling with frustrated testosterone. Fletcher, who’d only been on the pitch
for half an hour, did that head-shoving thing that footballers count as a
headbutt on Stephens. McManaman ran in like the gnarliest back-up guy you’ve
ever seen, Stockdale started shoving him in some kind of muted northern royal
rumble, Stephens protested. Fletcher was sent off. Just in case that wasn’t
funny enough, Hutchinson then flew in two years late on March – if ever his
recovery from injury needed testing – in an act that might not have kept him on
the hallowed turf even if he hadn’t already been booked.
That was that. What
a time to be alive. To recap: no, let’s try to piece it all together in our own
time, on Saturday morning, with the telly highlights. Some joke about Wednesday
getting revenge in this year’s play-offs seems appropriate but disingenuous. Lady
Luck, not least in terms of other teams’ results, has spoiled Albion for a rare
six months, to the point where only a brilliant collapse will stop them.
Championship, December 9 2016 It's always Leeds on a Friday night recently. Aggro on the trains and a loud away end regaling us with Marching on Together. They used to sack managers after the ignominy of losing to little Brighton. The best underdogging occurred when Gary Hart scored the winner against them in a game at Withdean, there hanging a prevailing sense of shared bemusement at seeing a team of Leeds' faded glamour turn up at everyone's least favourite athletics track and field. Nowadays they routinely yield to the good guys, and there’s so little justifying description about this game. The stats – Albion had nine for each of Leeds’s two shots on goal – succinctly articulate the level of dominance enacted. The first goal happened when Kalvin Phillips channelled Rod Thomas’s bygone volleyball heroics, vainly lolloping the ball out just as it was about to cross the line, like a tipsy holiday-maker in a deep pool trying to scoop a beach ball pelted at him at point blank range. A line of Albion players gleefully appealed in unison across the six yard line, led by Dunk, who was thoroughly over-excited having protracted the leg which tonked Knockaert's deep corner goalwards from beyond the far post. Murray, god of goals in front of the north, glanced over his shoulder at the ref with a doleful, would-you-care-for-me look, paused and banged it in the net. The rest of the game was essentially a concentrated victory lap. Leeds were there. They were robust. They had a midfielder born in 1998 called Ronaldo Vieira (his twin brother is called Romario), which probably softens the blow for their fans. Stockdale, a dream in a dark shade of salmon, had the odd bit of penalty area admin to do, but could have spent the game farting out fear is a liar tweets on his phone if he'd wanted to. That's five goals Albion have conceded in the second half all season now. Two were at Newcastle and Reading, one was a 95th minute consolation for the home side at Hillsborough, and one of the others was for Preston in injury time at Falmer. Right at the fizzled end of 2016, Hemed’s gone all 90s garage and got his squad number shaved into the side of his hair, the natural conclusion to which should be Nike capitalising on the chance to recreate the eternal fashion of the barbered swoosh on the bonce of Israel’s finest striker. Hemed had replaced Glenn, who got Man of the Match, and was thus the man for the job when Dunk probably dived to win a penalty. There was a bit of cosmic rebalancing there, involving as it did the same kind of innocuous tangle from which Dunk conceded a laughable penalty when Albion drew at Burnley last season. No hassle for Hemed, who sent it straight down the shoot, as if he had more pressing matters on his mind, like hanging out with Miss Israel or getting more signs swooshed into his scalp. And now here we are, eight points beyond third, stronger than last season but without two other sides having mindblowing years. It's a position from which, statistically, everyone ends up spraying champagne and wheezing dizzily, unless they've got Kevin Keegan in charge. If nurses were observing the wellness of the other promotion hopefuls, they'd be thinking about the necessity of the life support machine. It's not arrogant to say that, unless you're actually being arrogant, which probably isn't in your nature if you're an Albion fan. If this gravy train derails it'll be no surprise, everyone will laugh and sigh and the resigned bitterness will flow once more. The thing is, Kayal – the player who really brings the Other amid a lot of consistency and workmanship – is yet to come back. Hünemeier and Goldson haven’t even been in the side all season. The innate Albion anxieties still tangibly linger: disbelief, and a suspicion there'll be some sort of stipulation that the team automatically enters the play-offs no matter how stratospheric its points total. Even when the situation’s outlandishly promising, fear often isn’t a liar. It's just nowhere to be seen with 20 games gone.
