Little festive cheer for Hammers or Seagulls after draw

Dave Tickner
Lewis Dunk West Ham Brighton

You don’t always get what you want for Christmas. And for West Ham and Brighton it was a stocking mainly full of socks, hankies and a slightly manky satsuma as their Premier League clash ended in a 2-2 draw that should satisfy neither.

Neal Maupay will rightly enjoy his festive return to goalscoring form after an eight-game drought, while West Ham youngster Ben Johnson scoring his first goal for the club is another warming Christmas tale.

For the most part, though, nobody’s really got what they wanted here. Brighton would probably have taken a point before kick-off, but not after a first half in which West Ham were abysmal. The one-goal lead Brighton secured proved insufficient in a far better second half from the home side, but this is a game that both teams will surely view as a missed opportunity. Brighton led twice and couldn’t take all three points, while the Hammers would surely have earmarked this game for a home win.

The danger for West Ham now is that their current slightly sticky run of form reads one win in five; with away games to come in the next week at Everton and Southampton that can quickly become one win in seven and A Real Problem.

Everything West Ham did well today comes with a caveat. The subs worked – Andriy Yarmolenko and Manuel Lanzini both involved in the first equaliser – but that only highlighted the problems in the starting XI.

They definitely got away with it in avoiding defeat, and yet Brighton’s second goal will still rankle with the ball appearing to brush Lewis Dunk’s arm in the build-up in precisely the sort of nothing incident that wasn’t remotely controversial before VAR was brought in to end controversy. Here was a classic case of where those who insist all we want from officials is common sense could be happy to see it applied here, but it was bad news for those who insist all we want from officials is consistency applied according to the all-important letter of the law. The fact that these two groups contain precisely the same people in different combinations at different times is why VAR would always be pretty much doomed to fail even if it were vaguely fit for purpose, which it isn’t. Still, it’s something to talk about.

Slight element of fortune – in the era of joy-snuffing VAR silliness anyway – about their second goal notwithstanding, Brighton will know they have let a huge chance slip. This was a performance that takes its place in Play Like That Every Week And They’ll Be Absolutely Fine canon, but that’s also not how sport works. Brighton played well in a game in which their opponents played notably poorly, and they still didn’t get over the line. Those opportunities cannot be relied upon to keep coming along.

That’s a worry. Again, throwing things forward you really feel this was a chance to open up a gap on the bottom three ahead of a tricky run. Arsenal and Wolves complete the festive trio for the Seagulls, with Manchester City, Leeds, Tottenham and Liverpool all to follow before the first weekend of February. Looking backwards, a chance has been missed to make up for back-to-back draws against Sheffield United and Fulham. Three points from those three games feels light.

The congested nature of both season and table this year makes these missed opportunities seem more important than ever; a win for West Ham and they’d now be just a point behind Chelsea, Spurs and Southampton – all of whom have topped the table at some point this season. For Brighton, the luxury of a five-point cushion over the bottom three to help them through what could be a very tricky January.

For both, the rest of the Christmas period now just comes with that bit more pressure than it needed to.

Dave Tickner