SeagullinExile
Well-known member
I hate to say it, but I think Dunk may have to bide his time. Igor looks a different player this season, he looked to be carrying a bit more timber last year, seems fitter.
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[Albion] If Dunk is fit, would you start him?
- Thread starter Bozza
- Start date
Poskettspurpose
Active member
- Jun 18, 2021
- 85
You may be right, the club may agree with you, he may get injured, he may retire, he may move on. I promise I love the bloke as much as you and everyone else. He's eclipsed Brian Horton as our iconic top division captain and whatever happens LD's legend is set in stone for decades, so hopefully we can agree on that.
Tom Hark Preston Park
Will Post For Cash
- Jul 6, 2003
- 72,380
Dunk's time has been and gone sadly, time and succession planning wait for no faithful servant
I'm still not convinced ... Big mistake in him every game.
Bmuff he gave the ball away creating a 1 on 1 for evanilson. Luckily we have a proper goalie to save us these days.
Milano
Well-known member
Deffo comes back for Soton if FULLY fit. As well as being a fantastic CB and our captain he's also a threat in the oppo box, something that Igor doesn't appear to be, and isn't yet in JPvH's game enough either.
Is it PotG?
Thrifty non-licker
Whenever he gets back, I would hope that plans are in hand for a quick, young CB to fit in over the next season or so for the future.
This.
Igor’s second half was excellent, but his first half was really poor, both positionally and in possession.
The question posed by the OP is a really good one, something I have been pondering for a while. Love Dunk to bits but I am beginning to think time has caught up with him. I just hope the club finds a way to bow him out in the most gracious and respectful way possible. I am on the fence with this one. Only the coaches know what value he will bring onto the pitch, but sad to say I think we are seeing the beginning of the end of an era
Friday?
Maybe.
Erring towards no.
Maybe.
Erring towards no.
https://www.thetimes.com/sport/foot...n-transformed-player-premier-league-gknl7ww0g Quite liked this article on Dunk in The Times, but would have been better if it had acknowledged how unusually good on the ball he had always seemed capable of being, right from his debut. Overplays the transformation a bit as I don't think there is a defender in the world who would have looked a great ball player given how we set up 2017-19
Stains is a good reintroduction IF he's fit . . . . But would you start him?
Igor may make the odd mistake, who doesn't, and LD knows all about them, deliberate or otherwise.
I'm sure the club have some succession plans. They seem to be quite good at that.
Igor may make the odd mistake, who doesn't, and LD knows all about them, deliberate or otherwise.
I'm sure the club have some succession plans. They seem to be quite good at that.
Right Brain Ronnie
Well-known member
No, he has bench first.
Weststander
Well-known member
No.
Keep the winning defensive unit.
Keep the winning defensive unit.
warmleyseagull
Well-known member
Too early to call stumps on One of Our Own, methinks. Excellent article by James Gheerbrant. Link is here but it will be paywalled, so some highlights below. In short, Dunky has morphed himself into a different player and the stats show it.
Dunk’s first season in the top flight was his ninth as a first-teamer at Brighton. He was already 26, an age when many footballers have basically settled into the kind of player that they’re going to be. In that season, under Chris Hughton, Dunk was a solid, physical, unreconstructed penalty-box defender. He blocked, he tackled (mainly in his own third), and generally acquitted the defensive side of the game with such muscular gusto that one Brighton source told The i that his partnership with Shane Duffy was a pairing of “two doorman centre-half thugs who head and kick everything”.
His passing was not so much a string to his bow as a tool in his belt; something he used without crispness or rhythm or art. He played 40 passes a game, completed a low 78 per cent of them, and though he would often hit the ball long, his completed passes were only good for moving the ball 235 yards up the pitch per 90 minutes: a metric known as progressive passing distance. His closest matches from a statistical and stylistic point of view, according to FBRef’s database, were meat-and-potatoes defenders such as Tarkowski, Steve Cook and Craig Dawson..............
Which brings us to this point, where Dunk is now one of the best ball-playing defenders in England, maybe Europe. In the past 12 months, he has made only 0.78 tackles per 90 minutes, in the fourth-lowest percentile among centre backs in Europe’s top-five leagues. He has attempted 94.4 passes, in the top percentile, more than twice as many as in that first season.
But it’s not simply a question of willingness and volume. Dunk has stopped hurrying and learnt to love the pass; to use it as a precision instrument to break the press and set the tempo, to split the lines and pick the moment, to charge Brighton’s moves with velocity, energy and spark. His per-90 minutes progressive passing distance has been 567.8 yards, three full football pitches farther than in his first Premier League season. He is now most similar to players such as Van Dijk and Matthijs de Ligt.....
[EXTENDED DISCUSSION ON HOW GP, RDZ, & FH HAVE INFLUENCED HIM]. Concludes in Dunky's own words:
“Football is not what I thought it was. What I did before, I thought made sense. But when you learn something completely different, you believe in it and it makes sense. You think, ‘Why didn’t I know this?’ and, ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’”
Lewis Dunk’s transformation is the most remarkable in Premier League era
Introduced to new perspectives and cultures through Potter, De Zerbi and now Hürzeler, the Brighton defender has gone from “doorman thug” to artful orchestrator
Dunk’s first season in the top flight was his ninth as a first-teamer at Brighton. He was already 26, an age when many footballers have basically settled into the kind of player that they’re going to be. In that season, under Chris Hughton, Dunk was a solid, physical, unreconstructed penalty-box defender. He blocked, he tackled (mainly in his own third), and generally acquitted the defensive side of the game with such muscular gusto that one Brighton source told The i that his partnership with Shane Duffy was a pairing of “two doorman centre-half thugs who head and kick everything”.
His passing was not so much a string to his bow as a tool in his belt; something he used without crispness or rhythm or art. He played 40 passes a game, completed a low 78 per cent of them, and though he would often hit the ball long, his completed passes were only good for moving the ball 235 yards up the pitch per 90 minutes: a metric known as progressive passing distance. His closest matches from a statistical and stylistic point of view, according to FBRef’s database, were meat-and-potatoes defenders such as Tarkowski, Steve Cook and Craig Dawson..............
Which brings us to this point, where Dunk is now one of the best ball-playing defenders in England, maybe Europe. In the past 12 months, he has made only 0.78 tackles per 90 minutes, in the fourth-lowest percentile among centre backs in Europe’s top-five leagues. He has attempted 94.4 passes, in the top percentile, more than twice as many as in that first season.
But it’s not simply a question of willingness and volume. Dunk has stopped hurrying and learnt to love the pass; to use it as a precision instrument to break the press and set the tempo, to split the lines and pick the moment, to charge Brighton’s moves with velocity, energy and spark. His per-90 minutes progressive passing distance has been 567.8 yards, three full football pitches farther than in his first Premier League season. He is now most similar to players such as Van Dijk and Matthijs de Ligt.....
[EXTENDED DISCUSSION ON HOW GP, RDZ, & FH HAVE INFLUENCED HIM]. Concludes in Dunky's own words:
“Football is not what I thought it was. What I did before, I thought made sense. But when you learn something completely different, you believe in it and it makes sense. You think, ‘Why didn’t I know this?’ and, ‘Why didn’t I do this before?’”
- Feb 22, 2014
- 2,833
When we first came up I was pleased when Jamie Carragher praised Duffy and Dunk as good old fashioned defenders who love defending. In hindsight I don’t think he did Dunk any favours because lazy pundits latch on to things like that and look no further. He has long had the ability for long raking balls out of defence as we know but give a dog a bad name’
Taybha
Whalewhine
Yes, we've got a good squad Igor has proved he can step up so not got a problem with him keeping his place but a fully fit Dunk is better imo.
Anyway it's tradition, he's one of our own
Anyway it's tradition, he's one of our own