What does allowing Duffy to play for Ireland say about his Albion future?
When a player is returning from injury, the last thing a manager normally wants is for them to head off on international duty. Such situations have formed the basis of many club versus country rows down the years.
In some ways, it’s understandable. If a domestic side has spent weeks nursing a player back to full fitness, the last thing they want to happen is for them to go and play for their national side in a far flung corner of Europe and risk aggravating the injury all over again.
Instead, a club will wrap their player in cotton wool so that they are fit and firing for the resumption of league hostilities once the inconvenience of the international break is out of the way.
Which is what makes Shane Duffy making his comeback from injury with the Republic of Ireland a little odd. It could also point to just how far down the pecking order last season’s Player of the Year has fallen under Graham Potter.
Duffy limped out of the Albion’s Carabao Cup third round defeat to Aston Villa three weeks ago with a calf injury. At the time, Potter said that Duffy would be “out for weeks rather than days” with the problem. This proved to be a bit of an overcautious prognosis as he was back in training within a fortnight.
After three days of work with the Albion last week, Potter gave the green light for Duffy to join up with Ireland ahead of their trip to Tbilisi to face Georgia.
Duffy is a proud of Irishman and naturally he was grateful to Potter for allowing him to go off and try and help his country qualify for Euro 2020 in two crucial qualifiers – the aforementioned trip to Georgia on Saturday and last night’s away game against Switzerland. But should that gratitude be mixed with a little trepidation about what it says about his Albion future?
The next few weeks could be crucial to determining how Brighton’s season goes with fixtures against fellow relegation candidates Aston Villa, Everton, Norwich City and Manchester United.
Potter will surely want his best and most important players fit and firing for four pivotal games. And yet after what was initially diagnosed as a long-term calf injury, the Albion boss was happy for Duffy to undertake a 6,000 mile round trip to Tbilisi and play 120 minutes for Ireland after just a couple of training session, risking re-aggravating the problem in the process.
From where we sit, that makes it fairly clear that had Duffy injured his calf again whilst on international duty, Potter wouldn’t have seen it as a big deal – after all, the approach he’s taken to the Irishman is in stark contrast to Davy Propper, who was ruled out of the Netherlands’ two games after his recent fitness problems.
Even Alireza Jahanbakhsh was pulled from Iran’s squad to stay in Sussex having recently overcome an injury of his own. In fact, if anything you’d have thought Jahanbakhsh might have benefited from going on international duty as he clearly isn’t getting a game for the Albion anytime soon. He might have even scored in Iran’s 14-0 demolition of Cambodia, although we wouldn’t have been surprised if he didn’t.
Duffy is a refreshingly honest professional, which is one of the reasons we love him. In the same week that Florin Andone gave that astonishing interview in which he blamed everyone but himself for his Albion career never taking off, Duffy held his hands up and said he deserved to be dropped as he hadn’t yet got to grips with the way Potter wants to play.
By packing him off on international duty so soon after injury, Potter appears to have made a pretty clear statement about where Duffy sits in the defensive pecking order – and it isn’t very high.
Perhaps we should have realised that in the game Duffy injured himself. That night against Villa he captained a side which, him and Gaetan Bong aside, was packed with players who could not legally go for a post-game pint with the Irishman in Molly Malone’s.
All things considered, it doesn’t look great for Duffy’s future as an Albion player. An individual as good as he is and who deserves to play regular top flight football would be an attractive proposition for a number of Premier League clubs both in January and the summer.
Are Duffy’s international exploits this month a sign that his Brighton career could be coming to an end? Let’s hope not.
