BRIGHTON — Eight months after the Amex sang that he would be sacked in the morning, Fabian Hurzeler watched his side take Crystal Palace apart before the tenth minute on Sunday.
Brighton & Hove Albion won 5-0, with three goals inside ten minutes, but the one supporters will replay came from Diego Gomez. Spotting goalkeeper Walter Benitez off his line, the midfielder hit a first-time shot from just inside the Palace half and sent it over the stranded keeper into the net.
It was the same fixture, the same ground and the same head coach as February, when Palace won 1-0 and home supporters sang “you don’t know what you’re doing” at him. Sky Sports’ Lewis Jones wrote that the club “could have pulled the trigger” when the noise around Hurzeler was at its loudest, and did not. The club’s own match report now has Albion second in the table.
The first goal came when Pascal Gross sent in a delivery that Palace’s Jaydee Canvot turned into his own net. Gomez followed within minutes, and Yasin Ayari made it 3-0 after nine minutes and 30 seconds, the quickest any team has reached three goals in the Premier League since April 2023, according to Brighton’s own match report.
That report puts Gomez’s strike at 52 metres, the longest in the Premier League since Wayne Rooney in 2017. Sky Sports described it as coming from “fully 50 yards”, about 46 metres, and neither says who took the measurement.
Babis Kostoulas made it 4-0 early in the second half. Jean-Philippe Mateta then hit the bar for Crystal Palace from six yards with only goalkeeper Bart Verbruggen to beat. Seven minutes from time, academy graduate Jack Hinshelwood scored from a yard after Benitez parried a Luka Vuskovic header, the first time in 70 years, the club says, that Albion had scored five against Palace.
Palace’s side of the afternoon is thin. The match reports read for this story carry no comments from either dugout, and neither gives Palace’s league position. In February, Hurzeler said he would “absorb the criticism”, Sky Sports reported at the time, so long as supporters backed the team.
Sky Sports counts 16 points from seven league games. Brighton also lost 4-3 at Chelsea on August 30, so Sunday is not the whole picture. How much of it was Brighton, and how much was a Palace side Sky Sports called “abject”, is something the scoreline cannot say.
