The Media Review: Albion knocked out of Cup by Forest

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The papers react to our penalty shootout defeat to Forest.

Nick Szczepanik

2025-03-30T10:35+00:00

Lewis Dunk comforts Diego Gomez after the Paraguayan's penalty was saved in the shootout. 📷 by Paul Hazlewood.

So the first penalty shoot-out at the Amex did not go Albion’s way, but the reporters shivering in the press box agreed that a strong performance in extra time of the goalless draw against Nottingham Forest probably deserved better.

As Paul Rowan wrote in The Sunday Times, “Forest adopted a policy of ‘Thou shalt not pass’ with both Murillo and Yates picking up bookings for hauling down Brighton’s busy sub Brajan Gruda. But in the second half of extra time Brighton started to punch some holes in the Forest defence with Gruda again providing the quality cross and Diego Gomez’s header being pushed over the bar by the diving Mats Sels. Brighton had found an extra gear from somewhere, but Estupinan wasted a free kick when he had a chance to put extra pressure on Forest.”

Riath Al-Samarrai of The Mail on Sunday was unimpressed by the first 90 minutes. “After the last game between these teams, Fabian Hurzeler set fire to his tactics sheet,” he wrote. “After this one, the BBC might have burnt the tape were it not for the compelling brutality of penalty shootouts and the inevitability of Nottingham Forest winning them.

“For the third consecutive round of the FA Cup, Nuno Espirito Santo’s side found themselves in such a lottery and as with the previous two it went their way. To Exeter City and Ipswich Town, we can now add Brighton to the list of sides who have come close to stopping the red train only to lose in the exact same manner.

“For Brighton and Hurzeler, there was none of the humiliation associated with their 7-0 defeat against Forest two months ago. But nor will there be a third semi-final in this competition in the space of six years, so it will sting. After this, they will resume their brilliant chase for European qualification against Aston Villa on Wednesday.”

Sam Dean asked in The Sunday Telegraph, “Did the better team win? Over the course of the 120 minutes, probably not. Brighton had Forest ‘against the ropes' (Nuno’s words) in extra time, and had enough chances to win the game before it went to a shootout. Fabian Hurzeler’s side certainly produced an improved performance from their previous meeting with Forest, which ended in a humbling 7-0 defeat.

“By the end Forest were happy to play for a shootout, given their obvious strength on penalties and the way that Brighton had grown into the occasion. There was a brutal symmetry to the shootout, which in some ways became a story of two homegrown players. Hinshelwood, the Brighton boy, missed. Yates, the Nottingham equivalent, did not.”

The Observer carried two pieces. Ed Aarons wrote the main match report, noting that “Brighton showed their intent at the start of the second half when Georginio Rutter fired just over from a tight angle following a corner as the game finally came alive. Hürzeler could not believe it when Hinshelwood passed up a golden opportunity to open the scoring as he failed to make decent contact with a header from a corner.

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Albion were beaten in the quarter-final of the Emirates FA Cup by Nottingham Forest on penalties, after the sides played out a stalemate over 120 minutes. Club photographers Paul Hazlewood and James Boardman were at the Amex to capture the action.

“Both sides seemed scared to make a mistake as the game drifted towards full time, with an injured Adam Webster having to hobble around for eight added minutes because Brighton had run out of substitution windows.”

Jonathan Wilson’s colour piece in the same paper reported the remarkable fact that Forest had equalled the feat of “Moroccan army side FAR Rabat, who beat MC Oujda, Wydad Casablanca and Rachad Bernoussi on penalties in successive rounds to win the Coupe du Trone in 2007.”

Wilson is writer with a fine knowledge of football history and he added that “The sense of occasion, the yearning for a semi-final, was palpable and, as so often in the FA Cup, there was a self-awareness, the game played amid echoes of the competition’s past, as though conscious of its own history. One home fan had brought a cutout of the FA Cup, albeit one that, rather than being made of cardboard or plywood as it would have been in a Pathé clip, it was fashioned of foam and had an inflatable seagull dangling from it. There was even a homage to Ian Rush in the 1986 FA Cup final as Carlos Baleba’s flashed just wide and knocked over a remote-controlled camera.

“But this was also a very contemporary occasion, and not just because of the pyrotechnics that cast this thoroughly modern stadium in the rolling Sussex hills in a cordite-scented haze just before kick-off. Only seven of the starting XIs were British, an obvious contrast to the 1959 final, when the greatest exoticism was supplied by Bill Whare, Forest’s Guernsey-born right-back.

“That’s a curiosity that takes on greater significance when it is considered how many of them had played in World Cup qualifiers in the past week. A total of 13 players from the two squads were involved in action outside of Europe. Seven of them travelled more than 10,000 miles in doing so.

“Brighton may have been in two semis in the past six years, but there is no sense of them being sated. Success remains an improbable dream; each step further up the mountain opens up new vistas of possibility. They are not clinging to achievement, grasping desperately at each trophy to stave off the fear of failure, hoarding silverware like a gloomy dragon in an Anglo-Saxon epic, which is how it often seems for superclubs.”