Harty: Brighton fans in the ‘Fab Out’ camp need to cool their jets – Tony Bloom’s opinion is only one that counts

I didn’t make the Amex on Saturday as I had a funeral in London, and to be frank, looking at the highlights, I think I go the better end of the deal.

Yet in the wake of yet another almost incompetent Amex performance, fans in certain quarters are venting their spleen and using the usual hi-tech stats as a stick to beat the Albion. The fairly new ‘expected goals’ stat is always a little bit misleading – I know that’s what the great and the good want us to live and die by, but Saturday is a classic example. According to the experts Albion were expected to score at least four goals, yet they, despite countless chances, only got two – and they were both penalties!

My old mate Warren Aspinall reckoned on the wireless that Albion could have been six up at half-time rather than being on level terms at 1-1 with the Foxes.

Warren did say that failure to take your chances in any game can have a horrible habit of biting you on the backside, and unfortunately he was bang on the money.

Rocket science it isn’t – if you don’t take your chances the footballing gods can sometimes end up kicking you.

The 2-2 draw put a huge dent in the Albion’s European ambitions, but regardless of the harbingers of doom, it is just that – merely a dent. There’s still 18 points to play for, and with 8th place guaranteeing another trip across the Channel, still not impossible it could happen.

Some weeks ago I did comment that any potential, if unlikely, Champions League qualification would actually be harmful to the Albion’s long-term development.

You could even argue that at this point the Europa League is also a bridge too far, but the UEFA Conference League, still very much in touching distance, is about the level of European competition Albion should be aiming for. We knew as far back as August that when it came to Fabian Hurzeler’s first season in charge, it was going to very much a learning curve, and at times feast or famine.

While thinking about yet another apparent failure I did recall the words of former Albion defender Gary O’Reilly, who spoke about the concept of a squad encountering their new manager for the first time. The overwhelming majority would look at the new boss and immediately think “Will this manager/coach make me a better player?”

Simple stuff, but to my mind far more relevant than the endless swathes of stats that get thrown at not only the players but the fans after every game.

For me the acid test would be: back in July, and after the subsequent soirées into the transfer market, how many Albion players would have had that thought? And perhaps even more significantly when it comes to the Albion squad, how many of their number can answer the question in affirmative?

Stats aside, what will actually be classed as failure come the end of the season? And ‘our failure’ or failure in the eyes of Tony Bloom?

The ‘Fab Out’ lobby really need to cool their jets, Bloom has the only opinion that counts, because if he thought the manager wasn’t up to it, he would have been long gone by now.