Tariq Lamptey is now a winger?
Brighton, having sold Dan Burn to opponents Newcastle, found themselves a centre-back short, with Webster out injured, forcing a shift to a 4 at the back defensive line. Typically Potter has preferred a back three with Lamptey and Cucurella operating as wing backs. Instead of Lamptey moving back into a conventional back four, Potter shifted him to right wing, playing just off Danny Welbeck and staying upfront whilst Brighton were defending.
It’s not the first time Lamptey has played this far forward under Potter, but he’s typically still been required to carry out defensive duties in a back five.
Before criticising the change too much there was one moment of brilliance in the first half. Lamptey won the ball back on the half way line, carried the ball forward and played Welbeck in behind Newcastle’s defense with a beautifully weighted through ball. It’s not unheard of for technically gifted wing backs to move into a more attacking position, Gareth Bale being the most obvious comparison. Lamptey’s aforementioned ability to dribble through a defense and his final ball should translate well, in theory, to the role of a traditional winger.
In reality Brighton’s attacking play was entirely unrecognisable against Newcastle. Lamptey now faced Target or Burn with his back to goal far more often. Conventionally Brighton’s attacking play has compressed the oppositions defensive line, with inverted wingers like Trossard and Maupay in a false 9 role, tasked with pulling defenders out of position, creating pockets of space. Brighton’s patterns of play create space in wide areas, when the ball is played to Lamptey he’s either able to collect it in that space or take the ball past an opposition winger that’s forced to track back. That’s most obviously shown in his stats where he ranks in the 99th percentile for progressive carries and the 96th percentile for progressive passes received (VS other fullbacks), Lamptey is a creative out-ball not the centre piece of an attacking move.
Against Newcastle Lamptey wasn’t able to operate in the normal spaces he works so well in, instead operating in a more congested area of the pitch in which he saw very little of the ball, only registering 28 touches before being substituted in the 58th minute. Veltman often had the opportunity to overlap, stretching the opposition but instead stayed behind the 18 yard box, meaning the only out-ball was a backwards one. Despite Lamptey playing, Brighton missed his progression, playing him in an unfamiliar role was a comprehensive failure as eventually proven by his substitution.
Alot of Lamptey’s success, and the reason he is such a stand out player statistically, is because Brighton’s passes of play create space for him to operate in. Shifting to a four defender system, and playing him in an unfamiliar role is part of the problem but not adapting those patterns and expecting him to dribble past more players in a congested defense is naive. It’s a question that Potter will have to answer moving forward, either change the way the team creates space for Lamptey or revert back to a more familiar system and play him as a wing-back again.
