Sunderland striker Brian Brobbey has garnered plenty of praise during his first season in England.
It can almost feel sometimes as if we as Sunderland fans are doing Brian Brobbey a bit of a disservice by focussing so heavily on his immense physicality.
Quite often, in giddy discussions over post-match pints or through eulogistic ramblings committed retrospectively to social media timelines, there is a tendency to reduce the Dutchman to his most prominent - and hulking - qualities as a centre-forward.
He is, after all, a peerless unit of a man, one who has come to embody a wholly unique headache for Premier League defences during his debut season in England, and one who, rather pleasingly, feels as if he practices something of a dying art. Brobbey is old school incarnate, a bruiser from yesteryear pitting his wits against the dainty technicality of his petrified contemporaries.
But - and this really is the key to his appeal and his recent success in a Sunderland shirt - he is also so much more than that. We all shuffle forward involuntarily in our seats when a ball is fizzed into his midriff as he backs menacingly into his centre-half, and we all had a good chuckle when he stood there shrugging innocently after a couple of Newcastle United players were left strewn at his feet following an ill-advised 50/50 at St. James’ Park the other weekend, but to suggest that Brobbey is nothing more than a rampaging brute force would be well wide of the mark.
For one thing, he is a finisher. While it may have taken him a beat or two to properly bring himself up to speed this season, the 24-year-old remains Sunderland’s top scorer in the Premier League, with six strikes across his 24 appearances thus far. Is that an earth-shattering tally? Perhaps not, but context is important, and only relegation-bound Wolves and Burnley have registered a lower cumulative xG than the Black Cats at present. Even on scraps, Brobbey finds a way of feasting.
And then, of course, there is the variety of his goals. Whether he’s throwing himself courageously into the mixer to nick a last-gasp equaliser against Arsenal, or bludgeoning a ferocious effort into the top corner to rescue a point at Tottenham Hotspur, Brobbey has shown that he is no one-trick pony.
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Perhaps his most valuable trait to Sunderland, however, is the manner in which he acts as a focal point through the middle. It is one thing to hold a ball up, but quite another to consistently bring those around him into the attack, and the biggest compliment you can pay the forward is that his side look notably worse in his absence.
When Brobbey is leading the line, the likes of Chemsdine Talbi, Enzo Le Fée, and Habib Diarra can buzz around him with confidence, knowing that he is the connective tissue linking them all together. Without him, Sunderland can be guilty of appearing blunt and disjointed.
In other words, across a relatively short span of time, Brobbey has proven that he is not just a battering ram, but the glue and the cutting edge that allows Le Bris’ frontline to function.
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