Barely 60 seconds passed between Niclas Füllkrug going off, Jarrod Bowen moving to the middle and West Ham United scoring from his saved shot.

That pretty much summed up Füllkrug’s first Premier League start. West Ham were better off without their £27 million striker, who was as slow and cumbersome as they come.

It was Mohammed Kudus who scored West Ham’s equaliser, but the goal was a result of Bowen’s pace and industry through the middle – two things 31-year-old Füllkrug failed to show in 57 miserable minutes.

The kindest thing you could say about Füllkrug is that he can surely only get better and he will need to take some time to get up to speed after spending so much time out with an Achilles problem.

Quite what his top speed proves to be remains to be seen. Against Brighton and Hove Albion, he managed to commit two fouls, gave the ball away as West Ham tried to launch a promising break and did nothing much else.

In the first half, Füllkrug touched the ball 13 times and lost possession eight times. After the break, he did not touch the ball at all before being replaced by Crysencio Summerville.

West Ham owner David Sullivan was spotted on the telephone next to the agent Will Salthouse not long after Füllkrug had gone off. Many more performances like this one and he will want some explanations over how the German ended up at the London Stadium.

Manager Julen Lopetegui will remain under pressure with supporters who booed at the full-time whistle, but the people responsible for sanctioning Füllkrug’s signing might not be so comfortable themselves.

West Ham have signed their fair share of strikers who have flopped over the years and Füllkrug already looks like a signing who is going to struggle to justify his fee.

West Ham originally wanted Aston Villa’s explosive striker Jhon Durán, who scored for a fourth successive game against Manchester City, and it is hard to see how Füllkrug was judged to be the next-best option.

Mats Wieffer had volleyed Brighton into the lead after a mistake by West Ham goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski. Kudus’s goal, a post and a brilliant late save from Fabianski spared Lopetegui another damaging defeat.

The performance of Füllkrug, together with the fact West Ham could count themselves fortunate not to lose, offered little encouragement of a dramatic improvement coming under Lopetegui despite the fact this was a third game unbeaten for his team.

“He [Füllkrug] has been three-and-a-half months out, so he’s out of time with our rhythm,” said Lopetegui. “It’s true that now he’s not in his best way. But it’s true that he needs minutes to achieve this level that we need.

“I think that when he’s going to be better, he’s going to last more. Okay, but it’s about the minutes, about the matches. The other way to recover his best face.

“Sometimes knowing the player is not in his best way, you need to put him in to play because we think that we are going to need him in his best way.

“For that, you can make training sessions, but you need to have minutes. We try to do that. In the meantime, he has to take advantage of these minutes, but it’s true that we have other solutions. All of them have to be in competition to help us to be more competitive.”

Brighton extended their unbeaten run at the London Stadium to eight games, but this should have been a victory for the Seagulls, for whom Kaoru Mitoma hit the post and substitute Yasin Ayari forced a superb late save from Fabianski.

“I think it’s two points lost in the end because there were plenty of big chances,” said Brighton manager Fabian Hürzeler. “We weren’t able to score and we weren’t able to keep a clean sheet.

“Then we got punished for that one mistake. In the end it was our fault that we didn’t leave the pitch as winners.”

Brighton are without a win in five league games and Hürzeler added: “There were positive things, but we also need to get the result to get out of this circle of bad experiences. We have to get our higher standards back.”