Gus Poyet puts Brighton & Hove Albion on the fast track to promotion ahead of escape from Withdean Stadium
Who, in all honesty, relishes watching football through a hammer cage?
Fast track: Gus Poyet refuses to shelve his passing principles as Brighton take on Stoke in the FA Cup fifth round Photo: GETTY IMAGES
By Oliver Brown 8:41PM GMT 18 Feb 2011
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The question has been joylessly dissected for over a decade by resilient fans of Brighton and Hove Albion, who have dreamt long of liberation from the ramshackle hovel that is the Withdean Stadium.
At last, that day is near, as Brighton prepare to move next season to the American Express Community Stadium at Falmer, after a bitter and protracted planning dispute. How apt, then, that the club’s transplant should coincide with so sudden a recovery of their league fortunes – all of it engineered by that charismatic aesthete, Gus Poyet.
From Montevideo to the Sussex Downs, Poyet’s odyssey has been a circuitous one, but in the eyes of Albion’s travelling band at Stoke, the Uruguayan is the man who can do no wrong.
After inspiring Brighton’s advance to the fifth round of the Cup, not to mention their three-point lead at the summit of League One, Poyet is savouring his chance to sustain the renaissance at a £90million, 22,500-capacity ground. “I’m the one trying to keep things calm,” he says, as expectation grows in the area that his team, not to mention their raucous support, could intimidate Championship opposition.
It is difficult to instil the same fear at the dilapidated Withdean, an athletics stadium patently inadequate for other use since Brighton transferred there in 1997, after the sale of the former Goldstone Ground. The place stands as definitive testimony to the view, put by opponents to West Ham’s residency at the Olympic Stadium, that an athletics track ruins the intimacy required by football.
Stands assembled from scaffolding, changing rooms squeezed into mobile cabins: the Withdean, accommodating fewer than 9,000 all seated, offers as chastening an experience for players as it does for the paying public.
In the only poll of its kind in 2004, the stadium was voted the fourth worst in the country – Gillingham’s grimy Priestfields claimed the dubious top honour – with visitors offering such verdicts as: “Worst in the Football League. The track makes the pitch seem miles away. The fourth side is a sandpit and a hammer-throwing area, which utterly ruins the atmosphere.”
Poyet has, at least, tempered such soullessness by the injection of some attractive, flamboyant play. Tommy Elphick, Brighton’s 23-year-old centre-back, reflects the manager’s dynamism when he says of the confrontation with Stoke: “We’re going to try to pass a Premier League team off the pitch.”
Brighton, the Barcelona of England’s third tier? This might be a stretch. But Poyet is busy cultivating a team in his own image, who exhibit the ‘pass and move’ fluency with which he became synonymous at Chelsea. “It’s about taking risks,” the 43 year-old explains. “To win, you need risk.”
An FA Cup winner in 2000, Poyet is hardly oblivious to the contrast between his players’ beguiling technique and the strong arm, often one-dimensional approach patented by Stoke.
“I’m expecting them to put us under pressure and to use their strength,” he says of today’s encounter at the Britannia Stadium. “They are very powerful and difficult to deal with, not only with balls into the box and throw-ins. They are quick and good technically. We need to deal with that, because there is a big difference between the two teams. We are going to play our game; we will not change.”
Poyet’s kudos had to be earned through struggle. Amid the flurry of interest his playing style has engendered on the south coast, and his trumpeting by admirers as a future Chelsea manager, it is strange to recall his role as sidekick to Juande Ramos, the Tottenham manager sacked in October 2008 after 12 ill-starred months.
Poyet’s coaching career appeared strangled at birth, but Brighton has afforded him an extraordinary renewal. What is more, his son, Diego, is thriving at Charlton’s academy and as a regular in the England Under-16 side. The name ‘Poyet’ could be part of the game’s folklore for some time yet, even if the name ‘Withdean’ is soon, happily, to be expunged.
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