Vote for your Brighton Team of the Decade: Left Wing

December 18, 2019December 18, 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.

Left Wing

Whilst the Albion may have worked their way through very few right wingers over the course of the past 10 years, it’s been a completely different story over on the left side.

So much so in fact that we’ve had to extend the shortlist. When we came up with the WAB Team of the Decade concept, the original idea had been to name no more than five potential candidates per outfield position.

Yet to do that for the left midfield spot would have meant missing out some big names. Christ, even with our extended pool of candidates we haven’t found room for Jiri Skalak who, lest we forget, was actually one of the Albion’s best players in the second half of the 2015-16 season.

Not to mention the fact that he went onto photograph himself pissed out of his mind, standing on a chair in his back garden wearing his own Brighton shirt and waving five flags around when we won promotion to the Premier League.

Skalak may not have made it, but these are the players who did. Who’s your selection for Brighton’s best left winger of the decade?

Kazenga LuaLua
When Kazenga LuaLua was fit and firing in the early part of the decade, there wasn’t a League One full back he didn’t give nightmares. He was genuinely unplayable in the first half of the 2010-11 campaign whilst on-loan from Newcastle United, scoring some absolute rockets against MK Dons, Bournemouth and Charlton until a broken leg sustained away at Hartlepool ended his season in November.

Gus Poyet paid an undisclosed fee for him in the summer of 2011 which was believed to be just over £1m and although LuaLua remained at the Amex for the next seven years, he never quite lived up the early hype.

Every time he looked like he was getting a run of games under his belt, he’d pick up a niggly little knock. Championship full backs were also less susceptible to his predictable ‘stop, stepover, cut inside’ routine than their lower league colleagues.

LuaLua managed to play 171 times for the Albion, scoring 22 goals. There’ll always be a question of what might have been, however.

Craig Noone
LuaLua’s broken leg meant that Poyet was in the market for a new left winger. When the Albion won 2-0 at Plymouth Argyle in September 2010, it was the Pligrims who had the best player on the park in Craig Noone. With Argyle desperate for cash, it came as little surprise when Poyet swooped a few months later to sign Noone for a bargain £250,000.

He spent the next 18 months delivering exciting performances from out on the left, his quick feet and love of running at his marker making him a popular figure with Brighton fans as the cry of “NOOOOOOOONNNEEEEYYYYYY” ran out around Withdean and then the Amex. After 64 appearances, he was sold to Cardiff City for £1.5m. He also once worked on Steven Gerrard’s roof.

Vicente
For many Brighton fans, Vicente will always be the most naturally gifted player we’ve ever seen in the stripes. Whenever the Spanish midfielder had the ball, football stopped being sport and became art.

There was the game when he scored twice to single handedly beat Portsmouth. The run against Derby County when he glided effortlessly from the edge of the Albion box, past nine Derby players before smashing the crossbar from 30 yards out. A stunning goal from 35 yards caressed into the top corner on his debut away at Ipswich Town.

People may say that he spent too much time in the treatment room during his two seasons at the Amex, but that kind of ignores the fact that if he hadn’t have been so injury prone, there is no way he’d have ended up playing for Brighton. Real Madrid wanted him for £30m at one point when £30m meant buying world class talent rather than Tyrone Mings.

Watching Vicente was a privilege. It’s very unlikely we’ll see one Brighton player dominate games in the way he did ever again.

Solly March
Solly March is one of the Brighton youth systems biggest success stories – even if we did only pick him up from Lewes when he was 17-years-old. He made his Albion debut in 2013 at the age of 19 under Oscar Garcia and has since gone onto be a regular for three other Brighton managers, racking up 171 games for the club.

That’s despite suffering a couple of long-term injuries too, most notably when missing nearly a year from December 2015 to November 2016 with a serious knee problem. A criminally underrated component in the Albion’s rise to the Premier League.

Jesse Lingard
Future England international Jesse Lingard only played 17 times for Brighton on-loan from Manchester United, but it was his attacking talents that helped lift Oscar’s side into the top six in the final weeks in the 2013-14 season.

The Albion had a squad who on paper should have been finishing somewhere in mid table. To secure a play off place was a ridiculous achievement and one that most of us seemed to take for granted at the time. Lingard was a huge part of that, scoring four times from out on the left. He also went onto net the winner in the FA Cup Final against Crystal Palace, which was nice of him.

Jamie Murphy
Jamie Murphy was responsible for one of the best moments of the decade when the Amex announcer managed to muddle him and Glenn Murray up, announcing that Jamie Murray was now coming on as a substitute. That alone would make him worthy of a place on this list.

Murphy’s footballing talents were just as impressive. While Anthony Knockaert’s performances down the right garnered all the attention across the 2015-16 and 2016-17 seasons, Murphy was busy doing a less glamorous but equally important job down the other flank.

He played 83 times for the Albion, scoring 10 goals. It seemed harsh that Hughton was unwilling to give Murphy a proper crack at the Premier League, especially when Izzy Brown was getting starts ahead of him and it was a sad day for us when he moved to boyhood club Rangers.

Jose Izquierdo
The latest in a long line of injury prone left wingers, Jose Izquierdo has been sidelined for most of the past year with a knee problem that has required three operations. The Albion have to shoulder much of the blame for this, playing him through the pain barrier when it was plainly obvious he wasn’t fit in the second half of last season. As a result, Graham Potter has said it’s doubtful we’ll see him at all in the 2019-20 campaign.

Which is a real bugger as Izquierdo is brilliant. He’s unpredictable, every goal he seems to score is a contender for Goal of the Season, he has an infectious laugh and to top it all off, his pet pig is more popular on Instagram than half of our actual players.

Leandro Trossard
Leandro Trossard has only been with the Albion for six short months but he’s made quite the impression in that time. So far, he’s come off the bench to win six points against Everton and Norwich, terrorised the West Ham United and Southampton defences and drawn genuine comparisons to his compatriot Eden Hazard.

Picking him up for just £16m from Genk looks like an astonishingly good bit of business. He might have arrived too late to make the Brighton Team of the Decade for the 2010s, but if the Albion can hold onto him and he carries on like this, then he’ll be a shoe in for the 2020s version. Presuming we haven’t all been killed by robots by then.