Latest Seagulls: Mark Brailsford pays tribute to Roy Chuter

For those still enjoying this great sporting summer, the arrival of the football season has felt rather like an uninvited drunken uncle has gatecrashed a rather enjoyable wedding and exposed himself to the bride. But the football season is here (has it ever left us?) and if you were able to avoid the tedium of the Rooney/Bale/Suarez sagas then you have done well to distract yourself from the play-off hangover. Gus Poyet is long gone and Oscar Garcia has taken the Albion reigns with considerable dignity.

Oscar Garcia, it has to be said, is an inspired appointment. Early results haven’t exactly been of the sparkling variety but with consecutive victories away at Birmingham and home to Burnley, the mood is upbeat and realistic.

So where are we? This early in the season it’s far too early to tell how the league campaign will pan out. Financial Fair Play (FFP) has certainly played a part in upheavals up and down the leagues but why it should have affected Albion so dearly is a bit of a mystery when the likes of Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth seem to be spending more robustly. Factor in the eye watering parachute-payment led spending gap between Wigan, QPR, Reading and the rest of the Championship and fair play isn’t the phrase that springs immediately to mind. The FFP at European level already looks like an expensive joke when the likes of Real Madrid are spending 100 million euros on a Welsh international. It remains to be seen whether this gaming of the system will help or hinder aspirational clubs like the Albion. For now we have to content ourselves with Paul Barber’s re-imagining of how the club is run to eliminate a financial deficit that was reported to be in the region of eight million pounds.
My prediction for the season: 10th place.

Roy Chuter

“30 years ago, Roy Chuter and I played football for HSB Lancing”

Some of you would have known Roy and a lot of you would have been aware of his sad passing. His legacy should be something that Albion fans pass on for generations, that when faced with unscrupulous ownership, football supporters have a voice and can make a difference. The fact that Brighton and Hove Albion exist at all is down to people like Roy Chuter who fought, like so many, to rid the club of Archer and Bellotti. Like many, this columnist has one or two fond memories of Roy. Thirty years ago we both played football for HSB Lancing, a team named after a beer which should give you an idea of the standard we played at. Roy was our goalkeeper. We were not the most successful footballing side and would regularly lose games by double digit score-lines. This was in part, thanks to breakaway goals scored by the opposition as Roy was leaning on the goalpost supping vodka and orange from a hip flask, secreted in the back of the net. Bless ‘im. He’ll be sadly missed, RIP Roy.

Premier League? You’re having a laugh
There is a sizable number of people who are not too bothered that Albion are not in the Premier League. The top flight has become a rather tedious circus full of managerial ego wars, foreign owners and players creating havoc (Hull City Tigers!? Pass me the sick bag!) and Sky Sports jizzing all over itself with every twitch of the Rooney/Bale/Suarez transfer saga (yawn). If this isn’t reason enough to reform the transfer window system, I don’t know what is.

Despite the Premier League bragging about it’s brilliance it is clear that there is a jaded feeling to watching Premier League football these days and with the England team struggling to find enough English players, they would do well to reign in the triumphalist rhetoric and concentrate on getting FFP to do what it says on the tin. On a brighter note, there is one positive to take from not getting past Our Friends in the North in that game. I’ll be enjoying watching Match Of The Day for a change as Palace get whumped on a regular basis before catching Albion smiting all and sundry on The Football League Show. Enjoy the season!
This column will only appear monthly instead of weekly for a while. We hope to be weekly once more very soon. Thanks for reading.