This particular football club have been a part of my life for 22 years now... through the good times and the (very) bad. I can't seem to shake it off - so I thought I'd pay homage with this page.....
BHAFC's results: 1998-99 season
BHAFC lists: 1999-2000 squad, facts, great moments, trivia.....
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A 7-year-old boy gets into football. Or soccer, if you're from the US. But which team? There's the usual crop of "big sides" to choose from - Liverpool, Manchester United, the London teams - like most of the kids at school. (Anyone who thinks that the current addiction to successful, Premiership sides amongst the nation's youth is a modern, Murdochian phenomenon - well, maybe it's exaggerated a bit more now, but seemed just as powerful 22 years ago to me.) But there's also the nearest club side to where he was living at the time, 25 miles away down on the South Coast, in (old) Division 3 at the time: Brighton and Hove Albion. Aka "the Seagulls". Never ever really done anything.
So a year passes during which the boy is taken down there two or three times. In this very first year, the team are promoted to old division 2. Hey, this is good, thinks the boy. The next year, the team miss out on promotion straight up to the top flight only thanks to a last day stitch-up 0-0 draw between Southampton and Spurs. 33,000 are there to see the last game of the season, which the boy spends on his father's shoulders. And he is hooked. Oh, brother, is this a terminal case.....
I can't help it. I know it's tribal and a little bit obsessive and actually completely out of character for me. Most people are surprised when they realise just how fanatical about this game, and this football club, I really am. It somehow doesn't fit in with the rest of me. But it's the way it is.
Three years after officially declaring my allegiance - and never, ever being one of these "part-time" fans who have a "second team", something I've never understood - BHAFC are in division 1, playing against, and even occasionally beating, the likes of Liverpool, Manchester United and Arsenal every week. They never set the league alight in those four seasons, 1979-1983, but compared to the success rate of small clubs these days it was a positive triumph. Somehow being a prepubescent football fan seemed very easy then. You pick a team, they rise effortlessly upwards. Not only that, but you can go and see them every week, and I did, most weeks, standing on the East Terrace at this point, in the ramshackle old Goldstone Ground - of which more (much more) later. And then, of course, in 1983, there was the FA Cup. A win at Anfield, home of Liverpool FC - and no-one won there - helped us reach the CUP FINAL.
Even the most casual football supporter remembers this one. Up against the mighty Man United (boo, hiss) - already relegated from Division 1, making up the numbers at Wembley. 10 minutes gone and Brighton are in the lead. A certain Gordon Smith rises above the United defence and plants a perfect header past Gary Bailey. Half-time comes and it's Brighton 1, Manchester United 0. Then, five minutes after the restart, a psychopath named Norman Whiteside as good as breaks the leg of our full-back. And ten minutes later, with a hastily rearranged side, we're 2-1 down. The commentators start talking about "plucky losers, not disgraced". Heads begin to drop. Then with two minutes left up pops Gary Stevens - a player who has almost never been seen in an opposition penalty box in his whole career - to score from three yards out. 2-2. Extra time.
Now almost everybody knows what happens next, or rather, after 30 more minutes of deadlock. I can picture it as clear as day, just as it appeared on BBC1 - for I admit now that I wasn't at Wembley. I don't remember why I didn't go. At 13 you make some strange decisions. Maybe I just worried that it was going to be a massacre. Pathetic, I know, and if it's any consolation it's bothered me ever since, but not half as much as the finale of this game. Incredibly tired legs suddenly break out of defence and bear down on the United goal. Michael Robinson, a man later to make an incredible success of being a presenter on Spanish TV, bears down on Gary Bailey and one other defender, with Gordon Smith, scorer of the first goal, to his right. Does he shoot? To this day Seagulls supporters are divided as to whether he did the right thing or not. The only thing that we can be sure of is that the famous line of commentary does not go, "And Robinson must score!!!!". By passing to Smith, Michael Robinson also passed on all the notoriety, and can face the Spanish TV audience without this historical baggage. For he passed. And Smith Must Score. Of course he didn't. He fired it against Gary Bailey's legs, the moment was gone, the whistle blown, the result - 2-2.
Full credit to the team of course. This was one of the all-time great Cup Finals, even the neutrals agree with that one. But the moment had gone forever. The replay was a 4-0 win for United. Not quite as one-sided as the score makes out, but pretty embarrassing all the same. And remember we were relegated that season as well. The glory days were over.
I don't remember so much about the next four years. I'd begun to take Saturday jobs, and was only at games very infrequently. Back in old division 2, we had some reasonable seasons, and another famous cup victory over Liverpool, but the cracks in the infrastructure were beginning to show. Too much money had been spent in the last few years on mercernaries without building up foundations. In 1987, the club returned to division 3.
Something of a rennaissance occurred the next year, however, both club-wise and personally. I was 18, working full-time now and able to go to games every Saturday again. And I had a winning team to watch. 7 wins in the last 8 games took us straight back up again, and a man called Garry Nelson was the new Goldstone hero, rifling in 32 goals that season. The final game victory over Bristol Rovers that took us up was the last day I remember tasting the fruit of genuine success with the Albion on a personal level, for changes were coming in my life too. The next three years were mediocre, but in 1990-91 the incredible happened: a club in serious debt looked as if they were in with a genuine chance of returning to the top flight. A direct free kick in the last minute of the whole season put us in the play-offs. A miraculous 6-2 aggregate win over Millwall took us to Wembley again, one match from promotion. And I was in Morocco.
I'd left Sussex where I'd lived all my life just at the Albion's last moment of triumph. Well, not triumph exactly - but certainly a form of glory. We lost, 3-1 against Notts County, but pride had returned to the club. 1991 - I moved to Yorkshire, totally disillusioned with life in the South and the so-called "friends" I found I didn't have there, leaving the Albion as virtually my only form of contact with down there. So all I could do over the next 7 years was watch from afar. And the distance between us made it all the harder. And if all this is sounding like a love lament, then I suppose it is. It's hard to see something or someone you love totally collapse.
The next seven years were a nightmare. The tale is told in many places better than this. See the links below for more details. But let's just say that even had it been a business, the mismanagement that was inflicted upon the club was criminal. There is no way any set of employees should have to be subjected to such pathetic behaviour by their employees. Why do I say "if it were a business"? Surely sports clubs are now businesses? Well, I'm afraid I don't agree. That's what people like Murdoch will never understand. Even a club as insignificant as the Albion still have 25,000 stakeholders out there. They may not be employees, or even regular fans, but heart and soul they are part of the club, care about the club, feel the emotion of every win, loss, bad refereeing decision. And most of all, they feel it very, very personally when a chairman like Mr. Bill Archer, Esq., comes along and tries to rip out their heart.
Don't think I'm being over-sentimental or over-poetic here. The situation at BHAFC in the mid-1990s was asset-stripping at its most blatantly criminal. A club so in debt that it could be picked up for almost literally nothing - £56.25 to be precise - but which has one valuable asset: the Goldstone Ground. 95 years of history situated right on real estate. And a chairman willing to change the constitution of the club so he can take out more than he put in (£56.25, remember). The answer? Sell the ground. But don't bother to find the club alternative accommodation first. Add into that situation a team sliding down the leagues and in grave danger of falling out of the Football League altogether. How can anyone not passionate about football understand that this wasn't just going to be a regret. It's not just something you can pass over. This was an attack on the very souls of Albion fans.
As I said, the story has been told better elsewhere. I can only add my point of view. For the first time since I moved to Yorkshire I was able to follow the fortunes of my team in the national papers - but for all the wrong reasons. Not only were they being forced to leave the Goldstone at the end of the 1996-97 season, but come December 1996 they were 12 - count 'em - points adrift at the bottom of the whole league, from which one team sank into oblivion. From cup final to 92nd in the league in 13 years. I went to what games I could, but the atmosphere was either funereal or hate-filled, the hate going towards Archer. It was not a happy experience.
Then a manager called Steve Gritt arrived. And slowly, the team began to believe that all was not lost. Although they continued to lose almost every game away from home, Saturday afternoons in front of the Teletext on weeks when they played out their last remaining games at the Goldstone began to be productive again. We were winning, catching up on the teams above us. But just as we seemed about to overhaul the stragglers, we'd play away from home, lose, and lose ground again. With a few weeks left we were still five points adrift.
The last game at the Goldstone passed. We won, 1-0 against Doncaster. And Hereford United lost that same day and suddenly, for the first time that season, we weren't 92nd any more, but 91st, with one game left, only Hereford below us. And in a coincidence so wacky that if you'd written it into a script, no-one would have believed you, the final game of the season was at.... Hereford.
The losers went down, out of the league. If it was a draw, we stayed up. There was no way I could make it down there. To be honest, there was no way I even wanted to be there. What if we lost? It would have been like a death. Again, maybe you find that ridiculous, but it's true. I spent the 90 minutes of that game by a radio in Leeds, listening out for the reports from Hereford. We went 1-0 down. I hadn't really believed all season that we really were going down, and still didn't. Second half - an equaliser! And then it hit me. The last 30 minutes were awful. Radio 5 tortured me still further by going live to the game for the last few minutes. When the final whistle went I stuck my head out of the skylight and just screamed. I saw a photo a few weeks later, of the Brighton goalie on his back, a mixture of relief, bewilderment and joy on his face as he celebrated the result, the miracle, ten seconds after the final whistle. My girlfriend said to me, "that's how you looked at exactly that moment, 200 miles away." It was over. We'd survived.
The year after was also bad, but never as tense, and now forgotten. For, as 1999 dawns, the Albion have a winning team again. Not every week, but we've turned the year in 7th place, the first remotely successful season in 8 years. We still play our "home" games 70 miles from Brighton but we're returning to the town soon. I go to the Northern games, and even saw them win this season for the first time since 1991! There's optimism again, genuine optimism. They're still there. They're still inside me, as much a part of me as any member of my family.
I don't care that they're 60 places and three leagues below the Premiership. I don't follow the Premiership any more. One bunch of highly-paid mercernaries playing another bunch - where's the link to the communities? Where's the heart? When clubs argue that they should enter the so-called "Champions League" by finishing third it makes me want to puke. Football may be part-sport, part-business but you can never remove the sport aspect - though some chairmen now would like to try. In sport, those with the most money do not always win. That's a fundamental principle. And just because a team don't always win doesn't mean that you can't think they're the best football team in the world. And Brighton and Hove Albion really are the best football team in the world. It's really very simple.
BHAFC links
The official club website is at http://www.seagulls.co.uk/. Like many official websites, it's not always updated as quickly as it could be, but is pretty decent on the whole.
Unofficial fan sites include the following: