Time is now for Aaron Connolly to grow up

Another month, another story in the newspapers about Aaron Connolly involving nothing to do with playing football for Brighton & Hove Albion.

Whilst Leandro Trossard was busy scoring a 90th minute winner at Brentford to send the Seagulls soaring into sixth place in the Premier League, the injured Connolly was raving it up at a festival with his ex-girlfriend and Love Island star Lucinda Strafford, as per her hastily deleted Instagram story.

The two were then spotted travelling back from said festival at a service station, leading Love Island fans and tabloid gossip pages to go wild with speculation that the two were back together. What an exciting prospect!

It is not unusual for an injured player to not travel to an away game in normal times, let alone when Covid is rife. But for an injured player who should be focussing on getting fit to be out partying? Well, it is an interesting approach to recovery.

Sadly, it did not come as a surprise. Brighton fans have become used to the extracurricular activities of Aaron Connolly to the point that many have given up on him. A leopard does not change his spots and all that.

You can see their viewpoint. In the calendar year of 2021, Connolly has scored a grand total of one Premier League goal. In the same period of time, he has:

• Broken Covid regulations and risked carrying the virus into the Albion’s secure bubble by meeting up with a woman for a romp during lockdown.
• Been in the papers for his apparent angry reaction with Miss Strafford for agreeing to go on Love Island.
• Been filmed trying to start a fight in Shoosh.
• Thrown his toys out the pram and been dropped from the matchday squad for Burnley away when it became apparent that he was not going to be in the starting XI.

Four times as many off the pitch incidents besmirching the good name of Brighton & Hove Albion as goals scored. And those are only the ones we know of officially. Not a good look, is it?

What makes Aaron Connolly consistently receiving opportunities to redeem himself from these misdemeanours strange is that it is the polar opposite to how Graham Potter has treated other Brighton players with alleged bad attitudes.

Anthony Knockaert was shipped out to Fulham without even playing a competitive game under Potter. Jurgen Locadia has been sent to Germany and the United States to concentrate on his music career first and his football career second.

Florin Andone has not kicked a ball for Brighton since his temperament making Donald Trump look sane and calm was laid bare when he was red carded for attempting to break the legs of Yan Valery after only 30 minutes of Southampton’s visit to the Amex in August 2019.

Whereas it has been one strike and you are out for those three, Connolly keeps getting opportunities to redeem himself. It feels like he could be announced as the Taliban’s head of government and Potter would still use his next press conference to say the matter had been dealt with internally and that Aaron Connolly deserves another chance to be reintegrated in the Brighton squad. Once he flies back from chairing a cabinet meeting in Kabul.

There is an argument to be made that Connolly becoming a liability in the bars of Brighton and the newspaper gossip pages is not a mess entirely of his own making.

The club have played a part. Brighton have almost certainly overvalued Aaron Connolly and helped inflate his sense of self importance, sticking him on a new four-year contract in July 2020 rumoured to be worth £20,000 per week after scoring three Premier League goals in 24 appearances.

A youth coach at a top flight club once said that the biggest threat to youngsters is when football becomes a paycheque rather than a passion.

Connolly was earning £1 million a year before he was 21 years old. Is it a surprise he thought he had made it and could start acting like Billy Big Bollocks?

That is not true for everyone, of course. Steve Alzate signed a similar deal at exactly the same time and yet he is not in danger of throwing his Brighton career away in the same way as Connolly.

The notable difference between the footballing journeys of those two? Alzate has done the hard yards in League Two with his first club Leyton Orient and then on loan with Swindon Town.

Having gone to places like Newport County and Morecambe on a Tuesday night, Alzate knows what a privileged position he is in. He had to grow up fast on the lower league circuit, as did Ben White and Robert Sanchez.

Loan spells in the Football League turn boys into men, which is why virtually every single player in Gareth Southgate’s England squad at Euro 2020 (in 2021) had turned out in the Championship or lower at some point in their careers.

Brighton going into the 2019-20 season with a lack of striking options after Locadia and Andone’s departures, combined with Potter not rating Glenn Murray meant that Connolly was thrown in at the deep end. There was literally nobody else to play alongside Neal Maupay and so Connolly had to stay rather than go out on loan.

Bar an injury hit spell at Luton Town in which he managed only two substitute appearances in the second half of 2018-19, Connolly has never experienced getting kicked around by Championship defences. At senior level, he knows nothing but the silver spoon world of the Premier League.

When Andi Zeqiri and Abdallah Sima were sent on loan this summer, it should have been Connolly. A season with Michael O’Neill at Stoke City or working under Nathan Jones again at Luton – two clubs and managers who would not take any nonsense – would have told us a lot about Connolly.

Had he grown up and scored goals in the Championship, then he would still have a future at Brighton. If he was more interested in having hissy fits when things did not go his way and frequenting whatever ghastly nightclubs there are in Stoke and Luton, then he is probably not going to make it at the Albion.

You only have to look at the example of Taylor Richards to see what such a year in the lower leagues can do. Some at the club apparently had concerns about Richards’ attitude during his first season after the Albion paid £2.5 million to bring him in from Manchester City.

Richards was subsequently loaned to League One Doncaster Rovers for 2020-21. 11 goals and five assists from midfield later, a much more mature player returned to the Amex to sign a new three year contract.

Richards now looks like he is part of Potter’s first team squad with his Premier League debut coming in the recent 2-0 defeat to Everton.

Connolly has natural ability. You do not score two goals on your full debut against Spurs without it. His performance that afternoon as Mauricio Pochettino looked on dumbstruck from the away dugout was reminiscent of a young Wayne Rooney.

The pace, the power, the willingness to take on an early shot catching everyone by surprise as he did for his second goal. It was all there. Not many players fresh out of the Brighton academy have made the instant impact Aaron Connolly did.

Maybe Brighton’s style of play under Potter does not help Connolly. He looks at his best breaking at speed and cutting in from the left. In an Albion side who want to pass the ball into the goal, there are not many occasions when he gets to run at defences with wide spaces opening up in front of him.

Playing on the counter seems to suit Connolly more, as shown when he gave Portugal a torrid time during the September international break when the Republic of Ireland came so close to causing an almighty upset against Cristiano Ronaldo and co.

But even if Connolly is not suited to a possession based system, he has still had numerous scoring chances to add to his five career goals to date.

Some of his misses have been downright outrageous; easy opportunities which you would expect a striker in Sussex Sunday League Division Six to put away after a night in Shoosh – let alone a professional footballer on £20,000 a week several hours before they enter Shoosh.

Connolly’s free header high and wide from two yards out against Sheffield United last season won our WAB Miss of the Season award. Him firing over an open goal from five yards at West Brom came second in the same category. A unique, unwanted and quite telling one-two.

Other highlights included hitting the corner flag when one-on-one with Bernd Leno against Arsenal and failing to roll the ball into an open goal when Spurs visited the Amex, giving Toby Alderweireld the chance to block.

Things have not been any better this season. In the only 45 minutes he has made it onto the pitch in a Brighton shirt, Connolly failed to hit the target with a simple chance front and centre of the goal in the 2-0 win over Watford.

These misses do not occur so frequently because Connolly is a donkey or Craig Davies reincarnated. As a professional striker, you should not need a great deal of ability to put a ball into 17.8 square metres of unguarded space from 4.5 metres away under absolutely no pressure. There is something else going on.

No less a centre forward than Alan Shearer once said that when he was in a drought and chances were going begging, he would double his work on the training ground.

“It’s about repetition, repetition, repetition,” Shearer said when discussing Chelsea striker Tino Werner missing easy opportunities midway through last season.

“Sir Bobby Robson used to say ‘practice makes permanent’. The next time the ball comes to you in a match, that repetition kicks in and you put it away.”

If Connolly’s off the field antics tell us anything, it is that his attitude lends to being the sort unwilling to go the extra mile in training. Does this explain why a player who clearly has natural ability cannot hit the proverbial cow’s arse with a string instrument?

Whether it be a willingness to risk causing a Covid outbreak amongst his teammates to bonk a woman, thinking he is Floyd Mayweather in nightclubs or hosting secret pre-Christmas parties which are not-so-secret when Miss Strafford and her friends plaster them all over Instagram, Connolly seems focussed on everything but what Brighton are paying him £1 million a year to do.

The patience of fans appears to have already run out. Potter surely cannot be willing to give him many more chances. If Aaron Connolly is not to become another one of those talented players who wasted their opportunity, then he needs to grow up and fast.