After Brighton’s boisterous post-match celebrations, Steve Cooper, the manager of Nottingham Forest, claims he was raised to “always” shake hands with managers.
Albion won 3-2 at City Ground on Saturday to record their first Premier League victory in seven years. Early on, Anthony Elanga gave the home team the lead, but Evan Ferguson pulled one back before Joao Pedro, a replacement, scored twice.
Shortly after Lewis Dunk was sent off for his excessive protest, Morgan Gibbs-White scored from the spot, but the Seagulls managed to hang on for a vital three points.
Rather than shaking Cooper’s hand, De Zerbi ran over to Brighton’s away supporters when the full-time whistle blew; the Welsh manager seemed surprised by this.
“De Zerbi is not someone I have seen. To be fair, I don’t want to get into that. You’ll have to ask him about it,” Cooper remarked. “As a British coach, I was raised to always shake hands after games, to treat people with respect, and to try to win and lose with grace. It’s up to him to answer that; I’m not saying he hasn’t.
But I’ll always shake hands if you ask me what I’ll do. But I recognise that things might be a little different somewhere else. That is the current situation.”
De Zerbi claimed that because Brighton is attempting to make this time one of the “toughest” in his managerial career,
With the forced substitutions of Tariq Lamptey and Ansu Fati in the first half, Albion now has ten players injured. It’s for all of those reasons that De Zerbi responded so happily.
“I would like to clarify our celebration; it wasn’t intended to be disrespectful to the opposition because I am accustomed to being around football. However, we are dealing with a lot of injuries; we lost two players in the first half, we were given a red card, we dropped two points in our most recent games against Fulham and Sheffield United, and our last Premier League victory was at the end of September,” he said.
This is one of the hardest periods of my career, so we are going through a lot of hardship. There was a huge celebration. We’re overjoyed, and I’m proud of the character and poise we displayed during a really trying time. It is tough for Brighton to compete in two competitions, the Europa League with Ajax, AEK Athens, and Marseille, and seventh place in the league, without ten players.
“Even though it wasn’t the Champions League, we celebrated it like it was, and we played a great game with 10 players minus the captain.”
