By Tim Hodges from the Amex Press Briefing
Gus Poyet revealed this morning he learnt a lot in his time as assistant manager of upcoming opponents Leeds United.
He revealed to me that the players will warm down today and he will look to try to keep the momentum from the second half against Liverpool.
He will be looking at the fresher players for possible selection. He was relieved the Albion are not away tomorrow and raised his slight concerned about the scheduling of games believing more ex players should be involved in admin side of the game.
He praised the performance and versatility of Roamian Vincelot saying this availability dictates other players’ selection and suggested that if had recovered from his debut in English football Vincente could be involved tomorrow night as could Will Hoskins also Kazenga LuaLua and Gary Dicker.
He did not elaborate too much on Will Buckley’s injury. However, he said that Buckley would be assessed a lot closer with this injury.
When asked by Brighton and Hove News to sum up his first 100 games in charge of the Albion, he said that it took a while to convince players, staff and fans to adapt to his required style of play.
He went on to tell me how proud he is of the Albion, saying some fans might now wonder why the Albion couldn’t play like this 10 years ago.
I went on to ask Casper Ankergren what he thought of the attributes of Kasper Schmeichel and Jose Reina. He told me that he was surprised how well Schmeichel kicked the ball and how verbal he appeared to be.
He thought Reina made everything look fairly easy and was a obviously a world-class keeper.
Ankergren also described a training ground incident at Leeds where he was penalised by Dennis Wise with 10 press ups for rolling the ball out to the nearest defender.
He said that he could tell by the look on his face that, although he said nothing at the time, that was the way Gus Poyet wanted to play.