Vote for your Brighton Team of the Decade: Right Wing

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.

Right Wing

When it came to deciding on the shortlist for the right and left wingers, we decided that the easiest way to go about it would be to write down all the wingers that we felt had made a contribution to the Albion over the past decade and then work out which flank they played on.

We ended up with about 20 different players – and yet only four of them were used regularly on the right. That leaves this as the most straightforward vote of the 11 spots up for grabs, which is just as well as the shortlist for left midfield is going to be longer than Shane Duffy’s Saturday night bar bill.

So without further ado, please select your choice for right winger in our WAB Team of the Decade. Here are the candidates.

Elliott Bennett
Not many Albion players have ever managed a season with numbers as good as Elliott Bennett in 2010-11. In an astonishing campaign, he scored eight times and registered 20 assists from out on the right wing as Gus Poyet’s side swept to the League One title.

Needless to say, that made him an extremely popular player with the Withdean faithful. It also earned him a big money move to Norwich City and a shot at Premier League football. Bennett would go onto have a second spell with the Albion, returning on loan briefly in the final throes of Sami Hyypia’s reign of terror.

Will Buckley
With Bennett departing for Carrow Road, Poyet needed a replacement. He turned to Will Buckley of Watford with the £1.5m paid to the Hornets making Buckley the first player Brighton had ever forked out a seven figure sum for.

It didn’t take Buckley long to repay that investment. Just 15 minutes in fact, which was will he needed to come off the bench and write himself into the history books by scoring twice on his debut against Doncaster Rovers to mark the first competitive game at the Amex with a bang.

Last minute goals – although none as dramatic as that Doncaster winner – became his forte over the next three seasons in which he made 112 appearances for the Albion, scoring 19 times. It surely would have been much more had he not seemed to pick up a different injury every six weeks.

David Lopez
One moment will always be associated with David Lopez’s time at Brighton – that stunning free kick on St Patrick’s Day against Crystal Palace. We may be six-and-a-half years on, but even now most Albion fans can shut their eyes and still see the way the ball bent and dipped perfectly around the wall and into the back of the net, leaving Julian Speroni clutching at thin air right in front of a disbelieving away end.

Lopez should be remembered for much more than just that, however. He endured a slow start to his Albion career after signing on a free from Athletic Bilbao, but once he settled in England he became one of the most important components of Poyet’s side which reached the play offs in the 2012-13 season.

An on-off contract dispute with the club that summer meant that he didn’t actually sign a new deal until four days before the 2013-14 campaign started and it was perhaps that lack of pre-season that saw him fail to hit the heights of his first year with the Albion.

Anthony Knockaert
From the moment that Anthony Knockaert rocked up at the Amex in January 2016, we knew we had something special. On his day – and there were plenty of those – he was head and shoulders above any other player in the Championship. Whenever he got the ball, defences would look terrified at the mere prospect of what might be about to happen. And with good reason.

Rarely has a Brighton player ever dominated a division as Knockaert did in 2016-17. He scored 15 times from the wing and ended the season as the Albion’s Player of the Season as well as the PFA Player of the Year for the Championship.

Knockaert didn’t take to the Premier League quite as well as we’d hoped, picking up two petulant red cards as he struggled when things didn’t go his way. There were still memorable moments though, not least that stunning goal to win derby day against Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park in March. A brilliant strike from a brilliant player.

Please vote for one right winger for our Brighton Team of the Decade