Brighton & Hove Albion v QPR

Team: Green, Onuoha, Dunne, Hill, Assou-Ekotto (Maiga), Traore, Barton, Jenas, Hoilett, Morrison, Keane.

Subs Not Used: Murphy, Hughes, Kranjcar, Henry, Benayoun, O’Neil

Attendance: 28,019 (including 1.976 R’s fans)

Harry Redknapp, the Queen’s Park Rangers manager, has not given up hope of achieving automatic promotion, but he conceded it would now be “tough” to break into the top two.

Late goals from Brighton’s Leonardo Ulloa and Stephen Ward condemned QPR to a fourth defeat in six games and leaves them trailing second-placed Burnley by nine points.

“It’s going to be tough to make the top two,” said Redknapp. “It’s very difficult, but it can happen.” The score-line certainly did not reflect the proceedings, with QPR dominating much of the game.

Ravel Morrison, who Redknapp described as “different class”, forced a good save from Tomasz Kuszczak, while the Brighton keeper also had to make excellent stops from Junior Hoilett and Armand Traore. Yet Brighton won it when Ulloa turned in a cross from Bruno Saltor, before Stephen Ward slid in to convert a Kazenga LuaLua corner.

Redknapp said: “I thought it would be a hard game, but it wasn’t that hard, even though we got beat. For 80 minutes tonight I thought it was as good as I’ve seen us play.”

The result put Brighton within touching distance of the top six, with manager Oscar Garcia saying he was “extremely proud” of his players.

Gordon Simpson – The Telegraph

Will Keane did his best in his demanding role as our lone striker, but unfortunately he looked lost out there at times. I really don’t understand why Tom Hitchcock hasn’t been given the chance to develop within our 1ST team squad?

Ravel Morrison had another very good game and came close to adding to his goal tally. The game was played at a much higher tempo and the statistics reveal that we had 55% of the possession and 21 shots, many of those blocked and 9 of them were on target. That said, some awful defending allowed the home side to take the lead after 77 minutes against the run of play.

Because of the lack of parking around the ground, Aggressive Steve decided that we would head for Lewes. The match ticket included local train travel and as we entered the station the platform began to fill up very quickly.

We were told initially that the in-coming Brighton-bound train wouldn’t stop at Falmer Station. Then there was confusion as some fans got on the train whilst others decided to get off which was followed by a station announcement that it would now do so, so on we all piled.

But was it? The next message informed us that the train was going direct to Brighton, but that was soon superceded by confirmation that it would in fact make an unscheduled stop.

Falmer or the Amex Stadium is just a few minutes’ walk away from the station and I have to say that it is well designed with comfortable seating and plenty of leg room. As for the atmosphere/ acoustics, although the home fans weren’t that vocal throughout the game, when they were, the noise levels rose considerably.

After the match huge numbers of fans began forming up at the station. There was a 10.10pm direct train to Victoria and after a long wait an empty train was provided for the short trip back to Lewes.

All-in-all it took nearly an hour to get from the stadium back to the station car park and although we were informed by Brighton fans that there were more trains available for Saturday games, midweek fixtures are very poorly organised.

Steve Russell