Vote for your Brighton Team of the Decade: Centre Back

December 10, 2019December 10, 2019 WeAreBrighton.com 0 Comments

In case you hadn’t heard or realised, the 2010’s are coming to an end. It’s been quite the decade for Brighton and Hove Albion with the Amex Stadium opening, two promotions and the realisation of the dream of Premier League football.

All of that success has been delivered by some excellent footballers. To recognise that fact, we’re putting together a Brighton Team of the Decade made up players selected by your votes. They’ll be lining up in the 4-4-2 of Chris Hughton’s Championship promotion season and the full team will be revealed before the clock strikes midnight to reign in the 2020’s.

Centre Back

This is where the real fun begins. Our third vote for the WAB Team of the Decade is for centre back, where you can make two selections from the eight man shortlist. The two players with the most votes will make up our defensive partnership.

It’s a position in which we’ve had some serious talents over the past 10 years. Homegrown players, full internationals, a bloke who was compared to a rock star and even England’s joint top scorer from the 2010 World Cup have pulled on the stripes.

Adam El-Abd
Oh how we laughed when shortly after his appointment as Albion boss, Gus Poyet decreed Adam El-Abd to be the best defender the club had. El-Abd had been a square peg in a round hole playing at right back, left back and in central midfield since his debut in 2003. What had Poyet been smoking to make such a judgement everyone wondered?

Turned out that Gus was right, of course. El-Abd went onto be crowned Player of the Year in the 2010-11 League One title winning season, beating the likes of Elliott Bennett, Glenn Murray and Liam Bridcutt to the award. He became a full Egyptian international and was transformed from a bald headed thug whose short back passes were a thing of legend to a cultured centre half who was comfortable in possession. It was astonishing.

Tommy Elphick
Poor Tommy Elphick. He surely would have played many more times for the Albion had he not ruptured his Achilles tendon in the final game of the 2010-11 away at Notts County. It was an injury that required two operations and ruled him out for 14 months, by which point a teenager called Lewis Dunk had overtaken him in the pecking order. Needing first team football to get his career back on track, Elphick left for Plucky Little Bournemouth in the summer of 2012.

Yet before his departure, Elphick still managed to make a very big contribution to Brighton’s successful start to the decade, racking up 35 appearances in the 2010-11 campaign for Poyet’s champions.

Lewis Dunk
When Poyet handed youth team defender Lewis Dunk his senior debut away at MK Dons in April 2010, little did we know that we were watching a future Albion captain and England international.

What’s made Dunk’s rise to the top even more impressive is that it hasn’t always been plain sailing. Not only was there the spot of bother with the law which he was ultimately cleared of, but it also tends to go forgotten that he hardly played across the 2012-13 and 2013-14 campaigns. Then, after one good season in 2014-15, he tried to force through a summer move to Fulham by handing in a transfer request.

Rejecting that request was one of the best things that Tony Bloom has ever done as Albion chairman. There’s been no stopping Dunk since as he’s become of the finest centre backs in the country with 285 Brighton appearances to his name to date. Barring any major injury problems, he’ll join a select band of players to have represented the Seagulls 300 times before the end of this season. One of our own.

Gordon Greer
Criminally underrated by certain Brighton fans, Gordo captained the Albion to the League One title and two top six finishes in the Championship. Only two other skippers in Brighton history can touch those achievements – Brian Horton and Bruno. That’s not bad company to be in.

Greer’s signing from Swindon Town in the summer of 2010 for £250,000 proved to be a bargain bit of business. He was instantly installed as skipper by Poyet and was the first true ball playing centre half that many of us had seen, making him crucial to the way we played in the first half of the decade.

Gordo made 234 appearance for the Albion before he was finally usurped in the pecking order by some younger models, leaving in the summer of 2016 after six years of distinguished service. Gordon Strachan once described him as being a rock star, not a footballer and we’re not going to lie – we bloody loved him.

Matthew Upson
With the Albion on the hunt for a Championship play off spot in the second half of the 2012-13 season and El-Abd injured, Poyet managed to pull off the impressive coup of signing Matthew Upson on loan from Stoke City.

Just two-and-a-half years previously, Upson had started every game at the World Cup for England with his one goal making him joint top scorer for the Three Lions in South Africa. It became apparent in Upson’s five months on loan that he was a cut above the Championship, which made it even more extraordinary that we managed to sign him on a free transfer when his Stoke contract expired that summer.

Upson went onto play in 43 of Brighton’s 46 Championship games under Oscar Garcia, being crowned as Player of the Season at the end of the campaign before returning to the Premier League with Leicester City.

Uwe Hunemeier
He’s a German, a mighty German, he’s Uwe Hunemeier. Not only did the BFG signed from SC Paderborn for a cool £2.5m have a ridiculously good song, but he was also a fine player and an even better professional.

Hunemeier had a very unfortunate time with injuries during his three seasons at the Amex which restricted him to only 36 appearances for the Albion. He was class though whenever called upon, most notably when stepping in for Shane Duffy during the 2016-17 promotion run in when the pressure was very much on.

We also loved the way that Hunemeier enjoyed turning out for the Under 23s so much. While a lot of senior professionals would baulk at the prospect of playing for the kids, Hunemeier celebrated the development squad’s promotion to the top flight of Premier League 2 at the end of the 2017-18 season as if it was the greatest achievement of his career. What a guy.

Connor Goldson
When Chris Hughton signed Connor Goldson for £750,000 in 2015, most of us assumed it was because Dunk was going to be granted his move to Fulham and Shrewsbury Town’s young captain was being brought in as his replacement. By the end of the season however, injuries to Greer and Hunemeier had thrown Goldson and Dunk together and they were forming quite the partnership as the Albion fell just short in play offs against Sheffield Wednesday.

The sky looked the limit for Goldson. And then a routine cardiac scan showed a heart problem that required immediate preventative surgery. It wasn’t just career threatening, but life threatening.

It says much about Goldson that he won the battle, returned to professional football, played in the Premier League and secured a £3.5m move to Rangers to work under his boyhood hero Steven Gerrard. That fee also makes him Brighton’s second biggest sale ever; not bad business on a bloke who played only 42 times for the club.

Shane Duffy
Shane Duffy’s record at the time that Hughton forked out £4m for his services was interesting to say the least. He’d played five times for Blackburn Rovers by that point in the 2016-17 season, scored two goals at the right end, three own goals and been sent off.

While his four seasons at the Albion hasn’t quite been as thrill-a-minute as that, it’s not exactly been dull either. On the pitch, he’s helped the Seagulls win promotion to the Premier League, been sent off for head butting Patrick van Aanholt in the first 30 minutes of a Brighton-Palace derby, scored some priceless goals and was a deserved winner of Player of the Season for 2018-19.

Off the pitch, he’s managed to have a brief relationship with Katie Price and been a huge contributor to Brighton’s economy as an extremely valued customer of Molly Malone’s and the Grosvenor Casino. I believe the term is ‘Living the dream’.