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The Football Notebook: Ole Miss Gets Its Revenge, Brighton Humbles Arsenal and Big Noon Has a Problem
Welcome to The Football Notebook, the weekly exercise in convincing myself that spending an irresponsible percentage of the weekend watching football qualifies as work. Technically, I suppose it does. This is an extremely convenient arrangement for me and an increasingly difficult one to explain to anybody who asks what I did with my Saturday and Sunday.
As late as last week, I got on the microphone on The Matchbook and declared that Arsenal might not lose a Premier League game until December or January. Dropping points somewhere along the way seemed inevitable because even the best teams occasionally spend 90 minutes kicking the ball directly at a goalkeeper who has randomly decided to become a demigod, but I genuinely struggled to find an upcoming fixture where an outright defeat seemed particularly likely.
Brighton heard me, apparently.
Beating one of the biggest clubs in England barely qualifies as surprising for Brighton anymore. The Seagulls have spent years cycling through managers and selling excellent players for enormous sums before somehow finding another collection capable of making a Big Six team absolutely miserable. Arsenal simply became the latest victim Saturday, losing 3-0 as Brighton turned a match against the defending champions into a rather lovely way to celebrate the club’s 125th anniversary.
There was something wonderfully satisfying about watching the game develop because every goal seemed to make the afternoon better than it had been a few minutes earlier. The first provided the initial jolt, the second made you wonder whether Arsenal was actually in serious trouble, and by the time the third went in, the Amex had turned into a party. It reminded me of sitting down for a really good meal and gradually discovering that the thing you ordered isn’t even necessarily the best part of it, because some side you barely considered has suddenly become the reason you’re going to remember the place. I don’t know. The metaphor got away from me a little bit there, but Brighton scored three goals and I had a lovely time watching it.
Arsenal will inevitably receive most of the attention because that’s usually how these things work. A title favorite loses and the immediate question becomes what went wrong with the title favorite, rather than spending much time considering whether the team on the other side might simply deserve some credit. Brighton has been doing this to England’s biggest clubs for years, though, and Saturday was another reminder that its ability to make far wealthier teams miserable has survived seemingly endless changes in personnel.
There isn’t much reason for Arsenal to panic. It’s just September, and every major goal remains available. It does put some of the more ambitious conversations on hold, including the one I was happily participating in about whether this team could go unbeaten. Every additional victory had made that possibility feel slightly less ridiculous, and Arsenal had looked difficult enough to disrupt that I had already started looking several months down the schedule for the first obvious place it might lose. Brighton saved me the trouble.
Not so fast, my friends. Not so fast indeed.