Yesterday, Brighton faced Blackburn Rovers at Ewood Park. Surprisingly, for a low-scoring Seagulls side, they played out a 3-3 draw, showing enormous reliance to come back from behind. In 1981/82, the club under Mike Bailey had another side built around a tight defence rather than an all-out attacking game. And yet, in October that season, they also sprang a shock by fighting back to draw 3-3 with mighty Liverpool.
Over the summer of 1981, Mark Lawrenson had left Brighton for Anfield. In the opposite direction came Jimmy Case. The match in the pouring rain at the Goldstone attracted a lot of interest, not least as it was the first encounter for each player against their former sides, with Case starting while Lawrenson sat on the Liverpool bench.
And yet it was almost as if the transfer hadn’t happened for Jimmy Case. Receiving the ball from Tony Grealish as the match gets underway, force of habit meant that he played the ball, under very little pressure, to the feet of Kenny Dalglish!
You can watch it all here in the first half highlights:
Later on, Case even plays a short ball straight to Ray Kennedy. Was he still reminiscing about his Liverpool days? However, he must have remembered he was a Seagull by the time he headed the ball goalwards and tried to claim it was over the line!
In a classic encounter, though, things came good in the end. He found his range in the second half, with a bullet header past Bruce Grobbelaar as the Seagulls sent fans home happy with two late goals:
Liverpool finished League champions that season, while Albion, aiming for a UEFA Cup place for much of the campaign, achieved the unthinkable by winning the return game at Anfield 1-0 in March 1982.
The Goldstone Wrap 