Sheffield Wednesday, to the general astonishment of everyone outside South Yorkshire, have a foot in the Premier League. Carlos Carvalhal’s side fought a rearguard action in East Sussex last night and it is they and not the team that finished 15 points above them in the Championship who will go to Wembley next week to, almost certainly, face Hull City in the division’s play-off final.
Tony Bloom, the Brighton chairman, had urged the home crowd to make the Amex Stadium a “cauldron of noise”. That they did, but at the final whistle came the silent recognition that their season was over. No team since the first world war has only lost five games in the regular season and not been promoted from English football’s second tier and Brighton finished level on points with promoted Middlesbrough only nine days earlier. Life and these play-offs can be cruel.
Lewis Dunk gave Brighton hope with a goal that came in a period of incessant home pressure as the Seagulls attempted to claw back a two-goal deficit from the first leg when they lost four players to injury. But Ross Wallace, one of Wednesday’s scorers last week, scored an equaliser out of nothing.
Brighton, who have been in the play-offs for three of the last four seasons, certainly had their chances to become the first team ever to overturn a two-goal disadvantage in these Championship play-offs. It was one-way traffic before the interval but in the second half, with the game becoming bad-tempered and the referee Roger East constantly reaching for his yellow card, Brighton ran out of steam.
Wednesday are a tough side to break down and Steve Bruce’s Hull, who have a three-goal advantage over Derby County on Tuesday, will not relish facing them on Saturday week. Their Portuguese manager Carvalhal, in his first season at the club, says his team will not be overawed at Wembley.
“This has been a fantastic season for Brighton and they deserve promotion – but then so do we,” he said. “We have played better and better as the season has gone on. We were not at our best tonight and Brighton caused us a lot of problems in the first half but after half-time we stopped the dynamism of their attackers.
“The club is a sleeping giant but it is waking up and we are making history. We know we will be underdogs but we also know we have a 50-50 chance of making it to the Premier League.”
Before last night its seemed Brighton’s manager Chris Hughton faced a challenge getting 11 fit players on the pitch. At Hillsborough last week they were forced to play the last half hour with 10 men after four key players left the pitch with injuries, including their leading scorer Tomer Hemed. Astonishingly, Anthony Knockaert, who had been carried off on a stretcher, started this game. And the Frenchman, a key January signing for Hughton (who was ironically named Championship manager of the season on Monday night), caused Wednesday no end of problems before the interval. Knockaert says he was drawing inspiration from his former team-mates at Leicester City and it showed.
He almost scored with a free-kick that cannoned off Keiren Westwood’s post and when he swung over a free-kick for Dunk to score at the far post after a period of incessant pressure it seemed that a glorious comeback was on. But Brighton continued to spurn good chances, two of them to James Wilson, and suddenly Wednesday were back in the game.
Wallace found some space on the right, swung over a hopeful cross to nobody in particular and the ball drifted past David Stockdale into the far corner. Even then there was a sense of injustice from the Brighton players who said Dunk was being impeded by Gary Hooper.
Hughton said: “There was a foul on Dunk and decisions like that and the red card for Dale Stephens at Middlesbrough have cost us dear. The changing-room is distraught and the disappointment massive. It was almost impossible to keep up the intensity of the first half for 90 minutes. It is very tough to go so close.”
