Brighton accept Holgate gift as Sheffield United remain the most generous of Premier League hosts

Mason Holgate red card Sheffield United Brighton

Brighton had scored just twice in their last five away games. Nowhere is better than Bramall Lane to solve those problems.

All credit to Mason Holgate for managing to find something Chris Wilder hates even more than eating a sandwich in his presence.

There are plenty of times when hindsight tells you an incident on 10 minutes was the most important of the afternoon; rare for it to be quite so glaringly obvious in real time as Holgate’s inexplicable decision to take enormous offence to the very existence of Kaoru Mitoma’s knees and attempt an ad hoc removal. Wilder couldn’t even look at his defender as he walked past him. And, unlike sandwichgate: fair enough.

The only thing harder to work out than the thought process behind that tackle was the thought process in awarding only a yellow card before VAR took one look and went “Mate”.

Usually there’s some kind of debate to be had with this. Some beard-stroking about “off the ground” or “out of control” or “excessive force” or “contact with consequence”. It’s rare indeed for VAR to get a chance like this, to correct an on-field error so obvious, so egregious, that it brooks no debate.

VAR being VAR, it still revealed a fundamental flaw of the whole thing, and that being the fact fans in the stadium remaining the least informed people of all about what’s gone on. Suspicion of VAR being what it is, the default assumption from Sheffield United fans – and this is no dig at them for a ubiquitous occurrence, it just happens to have happened to them on this occasion  – was that VAR must of course have diddled them, that Mitoma was a cheat who deserved booing for the rest of his afternoon’s work for daring to put his knees in Holgate’s way so callously.

This wasn’t helped by what was a pretty clear penalty for a shove on the same player going unpunished on field and by VAR in the brief window between the first and second goals. BOOOO!

Still, from the moment Holgate lost his mind – or at least, from the moment VAR intervened to insure said head-loss was suitably punished – it always felt like ‘when’ and absolutely never like ‘if’.

And ‘when’ turned out to be ‘almost immediately’ anyway. Wes Foderingham tried the standard goalkeeper’s ruse in these situations, going down ‘injured’ by sheer happenstance almost as soon as play had restarted to hand Wilder and his team a serendipitous opportunity to reorganise their five-man defence into a four-man one. Alas, this restructuring left out the quite important detail of ‘picking up Lewis Dunk at corners’ and he set up Facundo Buonanotte to bundle the ball home.

Minutes later, another defensive calamity allowed Danny Welbeck to make it two. By now ‘when’ had also changed to ‘how many?’

For a while, Operation: Damage Limitation appeared to have some hope. For a while, it appeared like both teams might settle for a 2-0 that suited all parties. Brighton to get a long overdue away win, Sheffield United to avoid humiliation.

Even that was too much to ask, though. Simon Adingra completed a Quite Good Week with a couple of goals and for Sheffield United came the familiar feeling of shipping five goals at home. Including the FA Cup game against today’s opponents, it’s the third straight time it’s happened and fourth in all this season. They’ve conceded 20 goals in five home games since a clean sheet against Brentford in December. The next visitors to Bramall Lane in a fortnight’s time? Arsenal. Sh*tting hell. At present speed and course for both sides, double figures appears entirely possible.

For the Blades, the momentum of last week’s win at Luton was wiped out in minutes, while Brighton could scarcely believe their luck. Their last away win came at Nottingham Forest in November. For a team of their attacking talents and intent to have managed just two goals in their last five Premier League games on the road is a puzzle.

There are few grounds better suited to solving such problems than Bramall Lane right now. Sheffield United have now conceded 65 goals after 25 games – no Premier League side has ever shipped more at this stage of the season. A hundred goals conceded is very much on – who knows how much of a dent Arsenal might make in the remaining 35 – for a side that finds it hard enough to keep the score down with 11 men on the field.