YOU'RE WRONG, KIPLING!

BRIGHTON FAN DAVID WILLIAMS REFLECTS ON THE DIFFERING EMOTIONS OF HIS CLUB'S HIGHS AND LOWS...

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In his famous poem If, Rudyard Kipling asks among other virtues:

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two impostors just the same… you’ll be a Man, my son.

Having experienced triumph and near disaster in my 35-and-a-half years as a Brighton fan, I can confirm that this element of the poem is definitely not true. Watching your team at their absolute peak can in no way compare to their nadir, when they came within 45 minutes of oblivion. Groundless, broke and potentially without a league to play in if they lost, Brighton had to at least draw with Hereford on the final day of the season to stay in the league, at their opponents’ expense.

Yet 9,721 days later I’m watching Brighton at their peak (to date) following a journey that involved five trains that eventually delivered me to the resplendent Amex Stadium, Brighton’s home since 2011.

I’m here to watch them take on 1993 European Cup winners Marseille in a battle to finish top of their Europa League group. Brighton have to win this time rather than only requiring a draw, but the odds were in favour of our truly exceptional team.

Brighton were a very different club back in the late 1990s, struggling at the bottom of the Football League, having gone through a steady decline since being relegated from the First Division in 1983.

What had been an innocent family decision to start watching our local team in 1988 became a family obsession by 1991, a move that felt justified after watching them come back from two goals down to draw with the reigning champions Liverpool at Anfield.