Trust, courage, brains and a process: Sunday’s FA Cup semi-finalists have defied all the odds under Tony Bloom
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.
Above all they are prepared to trust in a group of players who a year ago could have walked down Brighton beach without being recognised: players such as Kaoru Mitoma and Evan Ferguson and Julio Enciso, players whose true potential was hiding in plain sight. Kaoru Mitoma could have walked down Brighton beach unrecognised before he made his Premier League debut this season.Bloom himself may be some, more or none of these things, but what marks him out as a genuine son of the town is that constant and restless search for difference: for new edges and new approaches, new information and new ideas.
As a poker player, Bloom had no qualms in staking $500,000 of his own money in a heads-up match against Daniel Negreanu, one of the all-time greats of the game. As a punter, he calmly staked £600,000 on one of his own horses to win the Queen Mother Champion Chase at Cheltenham. But take on a lower-league football club and you are taking on a different kind of gamble entirely.
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