Charalampos Kostoulas bicycle kick rescues point for Brighton against Bournemouth

Hello and welcome to coverage from the Premier League as Brighton host Bournemouth at the Amex Stadium.

Three points and three league places separate the two sides, who both have aspirations of a top-half finish. Tonight, Bournemouth start life without top scorer Antoine Semenyo, who joined Man City in a £62.5million transfer.

The Ghana international’s exit follows the summer departures of Ilya Zabarnyi, Dean Huijsen and Milos Kerkez but the biggest concern for manager Andoni Iraola is his team’s leaky defence, which has 29 goals in 10 matches on their travels this season – the worst record in the Premier League.

“It definitely concerns me. We are a team that scores a lot of goals and concedes a lot of goals,” he said. “If you want to be a very good team you cannot concede the number of goals we are conceding. This is the main reason we have not been able to get the results we want lately because we have been scoring a lot of goals and not getting the results.

“It’s very difficult to do the things we do – to go to Chelsea and score two goals or Old Trafford and score four goals and not win. If you score two, three or four goals away, you should get more wins and we are not getting them because we are conceding goals. If we don’t improve this, it’s going to be difficult to get more wins.”

Brighton will be boosted by the return of Carlos Baleba and Yankuba Minteh this evening. Midfielder Baleba is back following Cameroon’s quarter-final exit at the Africa Cup of Nations, while winger Minteh has missed the last three games through injury.

“He (Baleba) is back and in a good shape, in a good mood, so he’s ready to play,” said Hurzeler.

“Minteh will be back, will be an option. We had some players who were sick during this week but we still have two, three more days to recover and they will be an option for the game.”