He is absolutely horrendous in the air. Has no vertical leap and no timing. Your point about his formative years being at DM is a good one though. He’s been a victim of his own versatility and no he isn’t really anything. Toby needs to come back into the first XI ASAP.I get the feeling that Dier could have turned the corner as a CB if he had a few years at a Burnley or West Ham where he just got his head behind it and learned some of the defending dark arts to muscle memory.
Instead his formative years were as a DM and he’s turned into an oddly pieced together player at age 27. His defensive instincts and timing are consistently suspect, and while he does look imperious in the air at times he will never be good at defending a bouncing ball or one into no-man’s land. Bizarrely his range of passing has gone completely by the wayside, he is comfortably our worst passer of the starting XI. To top that off he’s just not a leader, he doesn’t have confidence that he is a top CB and never will at this point.
I feel bad for him more than I dislike him. But simply not good enough.
You are really making a lot of strong and mostly poor comments against our players. Try and make sense or explain clearly with something more thought out. Or just lurkeric the fridge hoping the fa look back at his incident last season running into the crowd and judge it as aggressive and threatening behaviour and ban him for 10 games
Just not good enough, too many mistakes, consistently gives ball away when pressured, can’t judge the flight of a ball and gets out jumped by midgets. Sadly feel like we will always buckle under pressure when Dier is in the defence.
I’d love him but can’t see is getting him in at 29.need to go shopping at southampton again in the summer, this time for vestergaard.