But of course, he also wore the blue and white stripes with distinction for five seasons and is a matchday host in HB’s Restaurant in the West Stand at the Amex.
“It is a nightmare and is very difficult for me,” he says. “I want Brighton to stay up and Chelsea to qualify for the Champions League. That would be the perfect season.
“But I’m sure it will be a great game of football, as both teams like to express themselves. We look to go forward now, and Graham Potter has done a great job in turning us from a defensive-minded side into an open, attacking one. Every time we get the ball it is exciting.
“And the goalkeeper, Maty Ryan, is really good. People were worried about him not being tall enough, but he is a fabulous shot-stopper. He is big in stature, and his agility is amazing. How he gets to some shots I don’t know. He is good on the ball and an accurate kicker, but he doesn’t take chances.”
Like most Albion fans, Gary enjoyed the 2-0 victory against Bournemouth. “For a few minutes just before half-time, I got a little bit worried, but after that it was all Brighton, and Aaron Mooy was so dynamic,” he says. “He is a naturally shy person but he’s certainly expressing himself on the pitch. His performance was brilliant, and he scored a terrific goal with a good first touch and an excellent finish.
“Shane Duffy looked good after coming back into the team. Yves Bissouma was electric on the ball, and he loves to get forward, but he also gave a great display of holding midfield play. The whole team performed brilliantly.”
Naturally, Gary also rates the present Chelsea team and the job done in his first season in charge by manager Frank Lampard. “Frank was always going to go into management,” he says. “In the last few years of his career he started taking an interest in youth systems and taking coaching sessions.
“Once he’d gone to Derby County last season and done well, he knew that at some stage in his career he would be coming back to Chelsea. It happened probably a little bit too soon in many people’s opinions, but he has adapted well.
"The Stamford Bridge crowd will give him twice as much time as they would give anyone else. They are all on his side and they believe that eventually he will come up with the goods. And they won’t judge him until he has had a couple of transfer windows. But to be fourth in the Premier League after a transfer ban, he has done a hell of a job.”
He admits that Chelsea’s results, especially at home, have been erratic, with defeats by AFC Bournemouth and Southampton preceding wins at Tottenham and Arsenal. “It’s kids,” Gary says. “When you have a lot of kids in the team you are going to have tremendous ups, but also tremendous downs.
“At the moment that is exactly how they are performing – up and down. You don’t know what you are going to get, not just game to game but half to half in the same game! They don’t seem to be at the races, and then suddenly they are running teams ragged. But Frank has no choice but to persevere with his young players until the transfer window is open. But it is brilliant that he has put so many in. Tariq Lamptey looked unbelievable when he came on at Arsenal, so full of confidence, and with no fear at all.
“Neil Bath, the head of youth development at Chelsea, has done a tremendous job there. They have won the FA Youth Cup six times in the past eight seasons. I’m so pleased for him that his kids are coming through and getting a chance now, just as Aaron Connolly is with us.”
The fact that Chelsea played Arsenal the day after Albion’s game could also give Graham Potter’s side a slight edge, he believes. “Just an extra 12 or 24 hours to rest can make a lot of difference at this time of year with the games coming so quickly. That might give Albion a little bit of an advantage.
“And I think Chelsea can be weak at set-plays. They are not big enough in the middle. Dunky [Lewis Dunk], Duffer [Shane Duffy] and Dan Burn could be a force to be reckoned with. What a turn and finish by Dan Burn against Bournemouth – he was so unlucky! They say there is a centre-forward in every defender, and I should know.”
Gary, of course, can claim to be Albion’s leading goalscorer among defenders, with 16 goals in his 252 appearances. “All centre-halves have a secret centre-forward in there,” he laughs. “We all want to be goalscorers. I loved getting up there for a header or volley.”
He broke into the Chelsea first team in 1979, just when the Blues were hitting one of the low points of their recent history. They were bottom of the old first division, often playing in front of crowds well under 20,000 and heading for the second division when he made the first of his 465 senior appearances.
“My brother had been training with Chelsea and my dad took me along when I was ten, and I went into their academy about two years before I should have. I started playing in midfield but then Ken Shellito, who was unlucky not to play in the 1966 World Cup because of injury and was now a Chelsea coach, made me into a defender.
“I like to think he saw defensive qualities in me rather than not fancying me in midfield! I was always decent in one-on-ones, and good on the ball as well. I was 18 when I made my debut against Middlesbrough at Stamford Bridge. We were already relegated, and I’d said to the manager, Danny Blanchflower, a few times that I wanted to have a go in the first team, that I thought I was ready.
“I got brought down for a penalty and we won 2-1, and there weren’t many wins that season as we had a lot of young players. I played the last four games of the rest of the season. We lost 2-1 away to the Villa side that would win the title a couple of years later, with Gary Shaw and Tony Morley.
“Then we had Ipswich, with Paul Mariner, Frans Thijssen, Arnold Muhren and Alan Brazil and lost 3-2. After that we played the two FA Cup finalists. We got a 1-1 draw at home to Arsenal and Malcolm Macdonald, and then another 1-1 against Manchester United at Old Trafford. I marked Joe Jordan. It was a baptism of fire!”
Chelsea fans do not look back on that spell in the second tier with much affection, but Gary enjoyed his football under new manager Geoff Hurst, playing alongside Ron Harris and Micky Droy. He played 148 games for Chelsea and scored four goals, the best of which was runner-up in Match of the Day’s goal of the season competition in 1980-81. He converted a cross from Clive Walker after some fine one-touch play, with John Motson yelling: ‘This first-time football of Chelsea’s is a joy to watch. What a tremendous run from the back by Gary Chivers.’
“It was against Newcastle at the Bridge,” he recalls. “They were top of the second division, we were second and we beat them 6-0. It was well-worked, the ball was passed around, it went here, it went there, and I kept running and managed to slide it in from six yards. I only realised what a good goal it was when I came off and everyone was praising the passing. I was thinking: ‘Really?’ Chelsea fans still remember it today.”
He left after failing to see eye-to-eye with new manager John Neal, moving on to Swansea and then QPR in the first division under Terry Venables, “the best manager I ever played for,” and then Watford, before joining Albion in 1988.
“Brighton were fifth or sixth in the third division, where I’d never played, while Watford were near the bottom of the old first division. But I decided to go to Brighton because I had a look at their fixtures and I even asked for a promotion bonus because I was so confident they would go up. I was probably a bit more confident than Barry Lloyd, the manager, but it was still a gamble.
“But it worked out excellently for me. We had Alan Curbishley, Mike Trusson and Dean Wilkins in midfield and Garry Nelson and Kevin Bremner up front, honest as the day is long, and big Doug Rougvie at the back. We had ten games left, drew three and won the rest, beating Bristol Rovers 2-1 at the Goldstone on the final day to go up. It was just a great fit.”
And he nearly added to the club’s roll call of international players, although the promise held out by the ‘We’ve Got A Maltese International’ t-shirts sold outside the Goldstone Ground was never quite fulfilled.
“I’ve still got one of the t-shirts,” he says. “My dad was Maltese, and someone wrote a story about me and I was asked whether I was interested in playing for Malta – because I wasn’t going to get anywhere near the England squad, and at 28, that was probably true.
“Contact was made with the Maltese FA before they were due to play the Republic of Ireland in a World Cup qualifier, and they said they would love me to play but I had to satisfy one of three criteria. Had I ever lived in Malta? And I said I hadn’t. Could I speak Maltese? I could say ‘ Yes’, ‘No’ and ‘Sit down,’ and swear. So no, not really. And was I married to a Maltese citizen? No, my wife is British. So, I couldn’t play. The irony is that even having an Irish grandfather would have qualified me to play for the Republic.”
He was later joined at the Goldstone Ground by former Chelsea colleagues Walker and Colin Pates and one-time QPR teammate John Byrne, who had been playing in France. “He was always going to do well. Clive Walker was coming to the end of his career, but he could still cross a ball. We had Mark Barham on the other wing, who had played for England.
“And everyone knitted together. Training started at 10.30 and finished at 12.30, but we’d get in an hour early and still be there at two o’clock. We enjoyed each other’s company. The London lads would stay over and we’d all go out. A 2-2 draw against Liverpool at Anfield in the FA Cup after being 2-0 down was fantastic, and Mike Small had a chance to win it right at the end. Ian Rush eventually scored the winner in the replay off his shin.”
That team reached the 1991 play-off final at Wembley but lost 3-1 to Notts County. “At 0-0 I played the ball off Tommy Johnson for a goal kick and David Elleray, the referee, gave a corner that they scored from. I saw him a few years ago, and went over to set the facts straight and he said, ‘You’re still going on about that from 20 years ago?’ and I added, ‘Too right I am.’
“I walked away from him because it was winding me up, but it was because of how much it would have meant to the club. We would have gone on there if we had got into the first division, but instead we ended up having to sell Mike Small and Budgie [Byrne] and we went down at the end of the next season.
“But I loved playing for Brighton even when they brought in the deckchair shirts. I was sad to leave in 1993. We just missed the play-offs, but my contract was up and anyone on decent money had to go.
“When Liam Brady took over he asked if I fancied coming to see him and I turned it down, but looking back I should have gone just to see if there was anything. Jimmy Case was back, Fozzie was still playing, but the club was drifting, and you didn’t really know what was going to happen.
“I never went to Withdean because I didn’t want to see a club I’d loved in that situation, although I was invited back. To see what the club has done since then is fantastic.”
Leaving Stamford Bridge did not mean that he had played his last game in a Chelsea shirt. He would wear it again on many occasions as player-manager of Chelsea old boys.
“Me and the wife ran it for about ten years,” he said. “I got in touch with some of the boys and asked if they fancied meeting up, playing a few games for charity and having a beer afterwards. Someone asked who was going to run it and everyone pointed at me.
“We used to go abroad and played in tournaments in Germany and France. Peter Bonetti, Kerry Dixon, Ian Britton, Ray Wilkins, Ken Monkou, Clive Wilson, Gary Stanley, Graham Stewart - we had some fantastic times.
“We used to have our ages as our shirt numbers – we had some with 52, 50, 55, 48. I’ve still got a shirt that the missus wears to do the gardening that has ‘Chivers 45’ on the back, which goes to show how long ago it was!”