Underdogs Brighton triumphing in the most rigged casino game of all

I t all began with fruit machines on the Brighton seafront: cherries and bells, the flickering lights and weathered carpets of the West Street arcades, the little tinkle of change as a nine-year-old boy’s pocket money disappears down the chute, never to be seen again. Later it would be the horses and dogs, football and cricket, stocks and shares, poker and property empires. And later still the happiness and livelihoods of real human beings, the pride of an entire town.

From his very earliest years Tony Bloom knew he had an addictive personality that drove him to gamble. And as the stakes began to rise, he realised he would need to learn how to do it better than anyone else.

The owner of Brighton & Hove Albion is such a secretive character these days that the few known stories about him have assumed a kind of sacred, apocryphal quality. One is that on the eve of the 1998 World Cup final, Bloom, then working as a trader for the bookmaker Victor Chandler, urged his bosses to stake their entire profits from the tournament on France to beat Brazil, calculating – correctly, as it turned out – that the probability of a home win had been grossly underpriced. Then as now, Bloom knew that the only true path to glory lay in being prepared to risk everything.

We know, too, how Brighton will approach Sunday’s FA Cup semi-final against Manchester United: with risk, which is not the same thing as recklessness. They are prepared for their defenders to risk leaving space behind if it allows them to affect play higher up the pitch. They are prepared to risk losing the ball in the most dangerous areas if it forces opponents to overcommit against them.

Above all they are prepared to trust in a group of players who a year ago could have