Reaction: Fabian Hurzeler on special day and great win

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Head coach reflects on 3-0 win against Arsenal at the Amex.

Bruce Talbot

2026-09-19T18:15+01:00

Fabian Hurzeler watches on as Albion take on the champions. 📷Paul Hazlewood

A delighted Fabian Hurzeler spoke to the media after Saturday’s 3-0 win over Premier League champions Arsenal.

It was always a special day for the club anyway today, but how extra special is it now?

I want to say congratulations to this special club for the history, for everyone who has contributed in the past, for everyone who's contributing in the present. I think the history of this club is very impressive, and hopefully everyone can enjoy tonight who has been a part of our journey so far.

And beside that, of course, it's a special result against the champions …

For me the performance is more important. I always try to focus on the performance instead of the result. The performance was really good from the beginning because we did the easy things right. We won our personal duels. We won the first tackle. We won the first throw and the first corner. We were really intense when Arsenal tried to play and we tried to stop their fluidity. Besides that, we had a good balance between controlling the game in possession and having good defensive stability.

So I have to give a lot of praise to my players, especially after this tough week with a lot of travelling. To show this performance shows a lot of character. They should enjoy today.

How proud are you that you've got a team who are able to do that against Arsenal?

I think it's very important to stay humble now and we won't speak about the missed chances. I think Arsenal also had a few chances. I think it's very important to enjoy this moment, but also understand why we have this moment, why we are successful.

Because in the end we always need to come back to our foundation, come back to our roots, and that's always like being brilliant in the basics, being an intense football team and to really trust each other. And I think one key today was when one went into a personal duel, you always had the feeling that my teammate was behind me.

Like this, you build trust. Sometimes we speak a lot about tactical approach, but in the end it's can you rely on each other on the pitch? Can you trust each other? Does everyone know his role in set pieces? Can you always be alive in every situation and moment in the game? That's what my players did today, and impressively.

It must be difficult to spot weaknesses in Arsenal. They'd won all their games before today. How did you go about doing that?

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Pascal Gross, Babis Kostoulas and Chema Andres all found the net in what turned out to be a memorable 3-0 win against Arsenal at the Amex, as Albion marked their 125th anniversary. Club photographers Paul Hazlewood, James Boardman and Simon Roe were on hand to capture all the action and key moments from a momentous afternoon.

I think it's not too much about the weaknesses from Arsenal. It's really about sticking to our principles and sticking to our beliefs and what we want to do in our game, especially at home and in front of our supporters.

And that was our approach, focusing on us not speaking too much about strengths or weaknesses from Arsenal. Everyone knows when you see their team, there will come a lot of individual quality. There is a lot of individual class, a top team and the current champions.

It’s about what can we do? What can we control to have the right approach and to be successful in this particular game? In terms of minute one to minute 90, attack versus defence.

Is that your best win at Brighton?

I think it’s a difficult question to answer immediately after the game because of a lot of emotions, but overall for me, the most important thing is the clean sheet. When you have a clean sheet, then we know that we are always able to score goals. And everyone had this mindset today - I need to defend first, and if we defend as a team, then we are able to create chances, and we know we can do this against Arsenal because we proved it in the past.

I think that a lot of these things also come back to our fans and our supporters. So they created from the beginning a great atmosphere, and how we wanted to approach this game and we got into this game with small wins. Everyone speaks about a win or a goal as a win, but a small win can be winning the first throw-in, the first corner, win the first header, win the first tackle, these small things.

If you win these small steps, if you celebrate them individually as a win, then you can grow into the game, then you can gain bigger wins. I think we deserved to lead. We created, I think, the right moment to score the second goal and overall defensively we were really good in the first half.

So this will always be our foundation. But definitely we got into the game by doing these small things right, but also by celebrating the small things.