Football with a snarl?

The Daily Telegraph's account of the Brighton victory was a bit over-the-top. Nolan didn't gesture at the home fans in a particularly provocative way and our tackling was committed but fair rather than dirty as the piece implies. And I wouldn't exactly describe Mark Noble as a "bruising  enforcer"... The Telegraph wrote:

The art of league success is in winning ugly, so the maxim goes; and it is difficult to imagine a more hideous triumph than West Ham’s last night. But it is they who left with the points, and it is they who sit second in the Championship after this textbook smash-and-grab.

Brighton certainly felt grabbed and smashed by the end...

If Sam Allardyce’s West Ham have shown at times this season that they are capable of getting the ball down and passing it, then here was a demonstration that the tactic of bombardment is still very much in the Big Sam manual. The game was a scrap, a brawl, from start to finish.

Playing just one striker in John Carew, and two bruising enforcers in Mark Noble and Papa Bouba Diop in front of the defence, West Ham set out, as many teams have done in recent weeks, to throw Brighton off their pretty passing game. That meant beefy shoulder barges, and spicy ­sliding tackles that gathered momentum on the greasy surface.

This was football with a snarl. Allardyce wore a permanent grimace on the touchline, launching verbal missiles at the heroically uncomplaining fourth official Gavin Ward. When Kevin Nolan scored, he ran straight into one of the home corners of the ground and haughtily gestured at them.