On the shortest day of the year, a game that burst only briefly into life. In the space of seven second-half minutes, from nothing and nowhere, things started to happen. Brighton took the lead. West Ham equalised. And then things stopped happening again.
There were, to be fair, some rousing moments in the closing stages. Crysencio Summerville, one of 10 second-half substitutes, dispossessed Jan Paul van Hecke and sprinted towards the area, but his shot was blocked; Yankuba Minteh, another, slid the ball across goal where the defender Vladimir Coufal, a third, deflected it on to the foot of the far post.
Finally, in the fourth minute of stoppage time and with Brighton finishing strongly, Evan Ferguson, a fourth substitute, who moments earlier had missed Pervis Estupiñán’s cross with the goal apparently at his mercy, set up Yasin Ayari, a fifth, for a shot that was well saved.
“In the second half we invested everything and normally we should leave the pitch as winners, but what is normal in football?” said Fabian Hürzeler, the Brighton head coach.
“It was an equal match,” said his counterpart, Julen Lopetegui. “We were better in the first half and they were better in the second.”
It is a crude definition of equality. The Spaniard insisted his side had produced “a quality match against a quality team” but his position remains under threat and will hardly be strengthened by a decision to switch to a back five midway through the second half that precipitated Brighton’s strongest spell.
But the lasting impression was of two teams that started a hectic rush of festive fixtures as if their primary motivation was to preserve energy for the other ones. In the first half only West Ham’s Jarrod Bowen and Brighton’s João Pedro looked at all inclined to shock the game into life, with Bowen unique in also looking able. Both ran at defenders, forced them to commit, caused moments of panic and confusion, but João Pedro’s habit was to keep the ball until the confusion spread also to himself.
In the 22nd minute Kaoru Mitoma’s volley, from a João Pedro cross, was saved; in the 34th Bowen’s centre flicked Lewis Dunk’s ankle and rolled just wide and that was as close as the opening period got to a highlight.
Both sides had summer signings from Germany belatedly making full league debuts, though neither Brajan Gruda nor Niclas Füllkrug did much to make them memorable. Lopetegui said Füllkrug is “without rhythm” and “not in his best way”, and the good news is that it would be hard to describe the £27m striker’s performance as disappointing. The bad news is that it would be equally hard to describe his almost completely featureless display as anything else. It ended in the 57th minute when he was replaced by Summerville and within a matter of seconds West Ham scored.
Brighton had taken the lead in the 51st minute when Estupiñán’s long cross from the left tempted Lukasz Fabianski off his line only for Dunk to win it cleanly. He nodded the ball down to Mats Wieffer, who sidefooted calmly into the near corner.
Seven minutes later, the home side equalised after Bowen was played through from the halfway line, toyed with Dunk and the returning Joël Veltman and shot from just inside the area. Bart Verbruggen pushed it away from goal but towards the head of Mohammed Kudus, who crashed it straight back past him. The scorer celebrated by perching on a hand-carved Ghanaian stool; one of the few moments that lifted the supporters off their seats involved a player sitting on one.
For Brighton, this was a fifth game without a win, while West Ham remain 14th and frustratingly inconsistent. Hürzeler described the past few weeks as “a circle of bad experiences and disappointment” that will end only when they “get back the winning mentality, get back the defensibility”. A change of fortunes will be high on both teams’ Christmas lists; this, though, was just listless.
