Vote for your WeAreBrighton.com Player of the Month for November 2019
After a relatively straightforward introduction to life as a Premier League manager for Graham Potter, we all knew that November 2019 would be when the real tests began.
For it was in the third month of the season that the first ridiculously tough run of fixtures arrived. Manchester United away, Leicester City home, Liverpool away in consecutive matches.
Even with United in an hilarious slump, Old Trafford is still a tough place to go. Leicester under Brendan Rodgers are the closest pursuers of the out-and-out leaders, who just so happen to be Liverpool.
It’s no surprise then that the Albion lost all three of those games. There was one other game in November, the visit to the Amex of struggling Norwich City from which Potter did deliver three points.
All of which makes this an odd month to compile a Player of the Month shortlist for. We haven’t played that badly collectively, but not many players have stood out enough individually to really make you sit up and take notice.
Take October’s top three for example. Aaron Connolly won the award, but he hasn’t had anywhere near the same impact as he did in his first month as a Premier League footballer.
Dale Stephens finished second but he hasn’t even been the best central midfielder this month, let alone best player. Pascal Gross meanwhile was third but Potter seemingly remains unconvinced by the German playmaker, having dropped him for the games away at United and home to Leicester City.
That leaves us in the strange position whereby none of last month’s top three are even on the shortlist for November. That’s never happened before in the nine seasons that we’ve been running Player of the Month awards, leaving this as an historic vote – and not really for the right reasons.
Shane Duffy
An injury to Adam Webster in the 36th minute of the win over Norwich saw Duffy given some rare first team minutes. He duly went onto score the Albion’s second against the Canaries, maintaining his place against Manchester United when Webster remained in the treatment room and then starting against against Leicester with Lewis Dunk suspended. Plenty of questions were asked about if his aerial ability might have prevented Virgil van Dijk from scoring two free headers at Anfield, but whatever your view on that the one thing we can all agree on is that Duffy clearly isn’t a Potter favourite.
Lewis Dunk
Three strong defensive performances and two goals represented the Albion captain’s best month of the season so far. He notched an excellent header in the defeat at Old Trafford before beating Adrian with a free kick after a fine piece of quick thinking at Liverpool. Reds fans were raving about him after that on social media and based on his November form, the Albion should be preparing themselves for firm interest over the next two transfer windows.
Martin Montoya
The Spanish right back is a strange one. He never seems to do anything spectacularly good, but he very rarely puts a foot wrong either. A solid 7/10 most weeks, he continued that throughout November with a string of decent performances. His best showing came in the win over Norwich when he gave an all-action display.
Davy Propper
This was the month when no lesser judge than Marco van Basten described him as being as good as Barcelona’s €75m man Frenkie de Jong. While van Basten might have been getting a little carried away there, Propper was clearly buoyed by his words and put in another set of classy performances. The best of those came at Anfield, where he created countless opportunities against the Premier League leaders and was only denied a rare goal by an excellent save from Allison.
Maty Ryan
Ryan may have been so underemployed against Norwich that he could have invented the world’s first flying car in the 90 minutes he was on the pitch, but in the subsequent games he’s been on a one-man mission to prevent the Albion taking a hammering. He was Brighton’s best player in the Manchester United and Leicester games and pulled off four quality saves against Liverpool too. Without him, the positives that everyone has gleaned from close defeats against the division’s top teams may not have existed.
Leandro Trossard
The half hour he was afforded from the bench against Norwich was enough to almost single handedly win the game for the Albion. He hasn’t had quite the same impact in the games he has started, most notably at Old Trafford where he struggled to get into proceedings. He does remain the Albion’s most exciting player though and deserves to be on the shortlist for that showing against the Canaries alone.
Poll closes at 8pm on Sunday 8th December
