BRIGHTON being drawn at home to Wolverhampton Wanderers in the third round of the League Cup takes me right back to the very first floodlit match I saw at the Goldstone Ground.

The date was 24 September 1969 and although I had started following the Albion earlier that year, I hadn’t seen an evening game before.

At the time, I also hadn’t experienced such a huge crowd, either. Average attendances tended to be around 12,000 but for the visit of First Division Wolves to humble Third Division Brighton, 32,539 crammed into the stadium.

I hadn’t been to the games in the previous two rounds of the competition, when Albion had beaten Portsmouth and Birmingham City, who were both in the division above.

Hopes were high that Brighton, managed by Freddie Goodwin, might be able to deliver a remarkable giant-killing hat-trick, although Wolves were clearly going to be a tougher nut to crack than their fellow Midlanders and Albion’s south coast rivals.

All the pre-match talk was about the star names in the Wolves line-up: formidable Irish centre-forward Derek Dougan and captain Mike Bailey (who 12 years later became Brighton’s manager). In the event, neither played, and Dougan’s place up front was taken by young Bertie Lutton (who would help Brighton to promotion three years later).

It was a special match for two of Albion’s players: goalkeeper Geoff Sidebottom and utility player Eddie Spearritt.

Wolves had given Sidebottom his break into professional football after plucking him from schoolboy football in Barnsley. He went on to play in the European Cup for Wolves and also appeared in the second leg of the very first League Cup Final (in 1961) when Aston Villa beat Rotherham United 3-2 on aggregate.

“It is always nice to play against your old club and I know what this draw means to our supporters,” Sidebottom told John Vinicombe, in an Argus preview of the big game. “They don’t come much bigger than the Wolves – wherever they play the crowds flock to see them.”

The size of the Goldstone crowd certainly wouldn’t have fazed Sidebottom: he had made his Wolves debut 11 years earlier in a Black Country derby against West Brom in front of 48,898 at The Hawthorns.

The occasion wouldn’t have bothered Albion captain Nobby Lawton or centre-forward Alex Dawson either, both having played at Wembley in the FA Cup Final in 1964 when Preston North End lost narrowly to West Ham. Left-back Willie Bell had also played in the FA Cup Final at Wembley, in the Leeds United line-up that lost to Liverpool in 1965.

For Spearritt, it was a chance to show his old Ipswich manager Bill McGarry, who’d given him his debut at Portman Road before switching to Wolves, that he still had something about him. And he took that chance when he buried a header from Kit Napier’s free kick to put Albion 2-1 ahead just before half-time (aftermath pictured above)..

Allan Gilliver had given Brighton a shock lead in the 19^th minute, squeezing the ball in at the far post after bustling Dawson had distracted Phil Parkes in the Wolves goal.

The visitors got back on terms 12 minutes later when winger Dave Wagstaffe intercepted Lawton’s pass and went on a lengthy run before slipping the ball to David Woodfield to equalise.

An upset might have looked on the cards, but Wolves had the canny Scot Hugh Curran up front and he raced on to a huge defence-spliting goal kick from Parkes to notch an equaliser on 70 minutes.

Curran struck again just eight minutes later, seizing on a mix-up between Sidebottom and Dave Turner to dispatch Wagstaffe’s cross.

Argus reporter Vinicombe perhaps over-egged his account in the following day’s paper when he reckoned “Albion should have beaten Wolves out of sight” maintaining: “The 3-2 skin-of-the-teeth success was highly flattering to a side standing fourth in the First Division.”

He did concede though: “In the final analysis, they displayed their class by twice coming back to steal a place in the last 16. They owed it all to Curran whose stealth stamped him as a superb turner of half-chances into goals.”

Wolves were knocked out of the competition in the following round (3-1) away to 1967 League Cup winners QPR while their Black Country neighbours West Brom went all the way to the final only to lose 2-1 to Manchester City.

While some observers of Albion’s cup exploits thought it augured well for a tilt at promotion, come the end of the season they disappointingly missed out on promotion when finishing fifth, five points adrift of runners up Luton Town, who were promoted behind champions Orient.

And before the new season got under way, manager Goodwin was lured away to manage Birmingham.