Seagulls boss Graham Potter has said that he has learned a huge amount about himself this season and hopes that the strong foundations laid over the course of the prolonged campaign will put the Albion in good stead for the future.
Five of the starting XI that sealed safety against Newcastle United on Monday are in their first Premier League season – and the experience they gained should be a massive positive going forward, according to Potter.
He said, “We hope we have laid a strong foundation. There are a lot of players who are playing their first season in the Premier League so you hope they’re going to be better for that experience and more able to deal with it, like us as coaches, next season
“We’re looking to get a good result at Burnley on Sunday then to having a break, a bit of shutdown time and then to be ready again.”
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It is also the head coach’s first campaign as a boss in the top tier, having worked his way up the leagues with Swedish top-flight side Ostersunds FK, before taking over at Swansea City for a year.
“I suppose you learn that you’re stronger than you think – you’re more resilient than you imagined,” he added. “We didn’t win a game of football for six months, if you had said that to me a year ago I would have found that hard to deal with because you get the constant questions.
“Then there’s the doubt and the torture that you go through to find the answers, because as much as supporters want to win we want to win too. We have families, we want them to have nice lives and winning football matches helps that process. But the reality of it is we didn’t.
“As a manager you’re compared to somebody else which is unfair, because I am just me, I don’t want to be better or worse than anybody else, I just want to be as good as I can be.
“I can understand how the questions are. You want to be respectful to the people that were here before, you want to keep things on an even keel. I suppose learning to deal with disappointment has been part of the challenge of life.”
That run of nine games without a win started at the beginning of 2020, but the head coach felt that the tide began to turn in the Seagulls’ favour with the first game back of the restart.
💪 What can we expect from @jensenweir, boss?#BHAFC 🔵⚪️ pic.twitter.com/mSFqwzxDiC
— Brighton & Hove Albion (@OfficialBHAFC) July 23, 2020
“I think you’d have to say the Arsenal home game was the key one,” he explained. “Coming back from the lockdown, which was an incredibly tough period for lots of reasons, to win the game in the manner we did goes down as a really special Amex moment – a last minute winning goal against a really good team.
“Then to get three points in the Norwich match with games either side against Manchester United, Manchester City and Liverpool was really important.
“You have to be good over a period of time and we have been. How we have approached things has been right, the togetherness of the group has been spot on.
“We didn’t take points against the three best teams in the division, but did against the others. That tells you something about the resilience of the group and their quality.”