Albion 1 Bologna 0: Hinshelwood's Winning Strike Highlights Tactical Shift
Albion went into their final pre-season outing without two of their star wingers and came out of it with something just as valuable: a workable Plan B out wide – and another win.
Jack Hinshelwood’s 59th-minute strike settled a 1-0 victory over Bologna at the Amex, wrapping up pre-season with a clean sheet and a glimpse of how this team might function without Kaoru Mitoma and the newly sidelined Yakuba Minteh.
Slow start, sharp switch
For 45 minutes, it all felt a little flat. Albion saw plenty of the ball, but the tempo was low and the movement ahead of it even lower. The Seagulls looked static, short of ideas, and rarely stretched Bologna’s back line.
Maxim De Cuyper, starting on the left with Ferdi Kadioglu pushed on ahead of him, carried most of the early attacking burden. The Belgian had the first two efforts of the game, both comfortably dealt with by Lukasz Skorupski, and later slipped Kadioglu into a dangerous pocket with a neat pass.
There were flashes. Hinshelwood forced a save with a volley after clever service from Olivier Boscagli. But for all the possession, Albion lacked a cutting edge. The final third felt crowded, predictable, too easy to defend.
Then the second half began, and the picture changed.
Rutter roams, Hinshelwood pounces
The game opened up almost immediately. Both sides carried more threat and Albion, crucially, started to find space in behind the Bologna full-backs.
Georginio Rutter drove that change. Operating as a very mobile No.9, drifting into something closer to a false nine at times, he worked tirelessly down the left touchline. One sequence summed up his influence: he battled to keep the ball on the flank, then surged infield and drew a foul as Bologna’s defence scrambled to contain him.
From that move, Albion finally broke through.
Rutter’s low ball was fizzed across the face of goal. Diego Gomez let it run, and it seemed to evade everyone until Mats Wieffer arrived on the edge of the box, charging onto it. His response was measured rather than explosive – a low, placed effort that looked as much like a guided pass as a shot.
Hinshelwood, alive to the opportunity and glancing towards the assistant for offside, was there to turn it in from close range. One touch, one goal, and suddenly a previously low-key friendly had a clear dividing line: before the goal and after it.
Flanks under the microscope
The pressure on Albion’s wide play has grown with Minteh joining Mitoma on the injury list. This game felt like an audition for alternative routes to goal.
Once the breakthrough came, the home side repeatedly exposed the spaces around Bologna’s full-backs, usually targeting Kadioglu and Gomez in those channels. Wieffer slipped Gomez in behind for a cut-back that found Hinshelwood again, only this time the midfielder blazed over from a promising position.
Gomez then switched roles, turning provider for Kadioglu, whose effort crashed against the post. The pattern was clear: Albion were finally manufacturing chances from the flanks, even without their headline wingers.
Later, a flurry of substitutions pushed the experiment further. Ibrahim Osman and Zadok Yohanna were introduced as more orthodox wide options and both immediately looked lively, stretching the game and offering direct running that had been missing before the break.
Solid at the back, questions on the left
Behind all that, Bart Verbruggen quietly did his job. He produced one sharp save in each half from Nicolo Carbiaghi to preserve another clean sheet and underline his status as the man to beat in goal.
In front of him, Luka Vuskovic and Boscagli again formed a composed pairing in the first half, dealing with what Bologna threw at them and giving Albion a solid base to build from.
But the most intriguing pointer from this final friendly came on the left. De Cuyper, used in tandem with Kadioglu, was clearly tasked with offering something different from a traditional winger – more of a creative, overlapping threat from deeper, rather than an out-and-out touchline runner.
With Mitoma and Minteh unavailable, that tweak might not just be a pre-season experiment. On this evidence, it could be the blueprint Albion carry into the trip to Tromso and beyond.
