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Hurzeler has inherited Klopp and Rodri’s title of Premier League’s sorest loser
Brighton coach Fabian Hurzeler

Our collective thoughts on Monday should be spared for talkSPORT, who are presumably rushing around trying to find a guest at short notice.

The Fabian Hurzeler: How I Beat Liverpool media tour has been cancelled. While the original Fabian Hurzeler: How I Beat Arsenal roadshow was a roaring success, the technicality of failing to beat Liverpool means that the German’s pencilled-in booking sat across from a fawning Jim White has had to be cancelled.

But Hurzeler got his soundbites in during his post-match press conference at Anfield as he officially inherited from Rodri, who himself supplanted Jurgen Klopp, the title of the Premier League’s sorest loser.

“We know that we are competing with the best teams in the league,” he said, after an undoubtedly competitive defeat to the Reds. “But we also want to compete with them, and we have to believe we can compete with them.

“If we only look at the performance today, then I think everyone in the stadium saw that there was one team who really tried to create and tried to win this game.”

It is a bold way of describing a game Brighton lost by two goals, failing to score in the Premier League for the first time this season.

The Seagulls did create ample chances. Yasin Ayari skied one at 0-0 and hit the post at 2-0, while one goalmouth scramble featured head-based obstruction from both Ronald Araujo and Jeremy Jacquet.

But reducing Liverpool’s 13 shots – four times as many on target as Brighton – and own positive attacking play to “four, five minutes” and “maybe two minutes afterwards”, is patently and hilarious absurd.

Cody Gakpo alone had six shots, at one stage resembling a hyper toddler tearing away from his impossibly younger but undeniably far slower and lumbering father, Luka Vuskovic.

The xG was broadly even (Liverpool 1.20 – Brighton 1.32). The game was certainly decided on moments with elements of luck and momentum involved, but that is sort of the nature of the sport.

It is categorically not in the realm of “there was one team who really tried to create and tried to win this game”.

That is the card Hurzeler played against Arsenal in March, when reacting to a 1-0 reverse by lamenting that “there was only one team that tried to play football today”, with all the poise of a child manipulating the rules of a game purely because they have lost.

In truth, that ability to move the goalposts will benefit the uber-talented Hurzeler’s career. His responsibility is to manage Brighton, not offer fair, balanced and unbiased assessments of his games, and those loaded “only one team” buzzphrases feed perfectly into the psyche of a club constantly striving to crash a party held by and for the elite.

Hurzeler serves “only one team”, so sees everything through that prism too. That it makes him sound wonderfully daft and deluded is just a by-product of his media work.

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