Discovering that lowly Margate had knocked Orient out of the FA Cup on Tuesday brought on a serious attack of the sniggers.

Not because I'm a closet Margate fan - my experience of the place being limited to a terrifying roller-coaster ride about 30 years ago - but because Orient have regularly shown a self-importance scorned by most Brighton fans.

When we still played them in the league, Orient fans enjoyed what the fast food industry calls going large. Applied, in this case, on the Brighton message boards where they were so large that one might have thought they had Champions League status instead of just being a small club lurking in the shadows cast by West Ham. This made their comeuppance earlier this week so satisfying.

Satisfaction should be treated with care, though, since it can easily turn into complacency and Brighton aren't immune from the giant-killings in the FA Cup. I've watched a number of games over the years that should have been walkovers, be it against league or non-league opposition.

After 90 minutes, however, the boots have a nasty habit of ending up on the other feet, so before getting too carried away about other teams results, I'll wait until we enter the competition in the third round, when I've got a suspicion that we are more likely to meet Margate than Manchester United if past draws are anything to go by.

On present form, I'd like to think that we can meet all-comers, no matter what the FA Cup draw delivers and I'm still confident, despite Wednesday's defeat by Nottingham Forest.

There's a renewed energy and battling spirit in the team and this was demonstrated last Saturday against Preston.

Listening to the match commentary on the radio, by half-time and with two goals adrift, I was convinced that defeat was inevitable and started the rationalisation process that - 'We have to lose sometime, it won't be the end of the world' and so on - by taking the dog out into the gloomy twilight and having an equally gloomy, one-sided conversation with it.

None of this proved necessary since the team came back with a vengeance in the second half and put two goals past an opposition who must have thought a comfortable win was already in the bag.

Young Mr Sidwell opened his goal scoring account and is already showing signs of being a very good investment. Even though the team is getting a tad heavy in the Ginger Princes department, it would be good if Steve Coppell can arrange a long term loan deal from Arsenal so that we can keep the lad until the end of the season.

A deal that would make good sense all round because Sidwell's performances will impress his Arsenal management as well as an increasingly appreciative Albion audience.

For all the cliff-hanging excitement that accompanied the Preston match, the prospect of meeting promotion hopefuls Nottingham Forest was always going to be a challenge.

I was seriously concerned about the psychological effects of being beaten, even by an excellent team, because losing now comes with some very nasty baggage.

The sort of baggage that 12 defeats in a row delivered and the effects of which Steve Coppell has worked so hard to overcome. Now the defeat has arrived, it hasn't come with doom and gloom, mainly because of the positive attitudes that Coppell has brought with him.

This was evident on Wednesday when, having gone two goals behind very early on, Albion could have conceded defeat and left little but dismal memories behind them.

Instead, and as Nottingham Forest fans have conceded, Brighton left a very different impression. Not just of a team who played quality football but one that played it with their heads held high.

That's a priceless quality and one that justifies us going very large indeed.

Roz South edits Brighton Rockz fanzine. Email roz@southspark.co.uk