Brighton star Lewis Dunk ready to upset Liverpool and Tottenham

Lewis Dunk is adamant that going toe-to-toe with Manchester United for two hours at Wembley has reinforced the belief that Brighton can qualify for Europe via the Premier League. An agonising defeat in the penalty shoot-out on Sunday meant missing out on the June 3 FA Cup final.

But the fact that both finalists will almost certainly qualify for the Champions League means that there is an extra Europa League place in the Premier League up for grabs. Likewise, Manchester United’s Europa Conference League place for winning the Carabao Cup will instead go to the team finishing seventh.

Brighton, currently eighth but with games in hand on the teams above them, travel to Nottingham Forest on Wednesday before taking on Wolves at the Amex Stadium next weekend. Then, after that comes a nightmare run of fixtures against the Premier League’s top four teams – Manchester United, Arsenal, Newcastle and Manchester City – in their next six matches before finishing the season at Villa Park.

However, Dunk – who joined Brighton as an under-12 player, playing in an athletics stadium and just a few years after nearly going bust at the bottom of the league – now believes they are ready to compete with the biggest teams in the land for Europe. “We have to go again on Wednesday,” he said. 

“We have nine humongous games if we want to get into Europe. We will park this loss and will be ready to rumble again. We were hurting in the changing room afterwards but we must hold our heads high. 

“We have something to look forward to. We cannot be thinking about this for too long and move on. We have got nine games to focus on to get to where we want to be.

“We are a well-run club from top to bottom. I have been on the journey coming up and it has been nice to get some praise with the cup run.

“But I think we have shown we are able to compete all year. We can beat anybody on our day and the good thing now is that we are at a level where we don’t go out there and fear people.

“We used to go out there sometimes and we were just trying to keep the score down. Every game in the Premier League was hard. But now we are going out there with no fear. We don’t fear anything in the Premier League.”