Graham Dorrans, Midfield Extraordinaire and Fixture in Daily Transfer Gossip

The West Brom Blog has found this great new place called Denial – everyone’s friends and they get everything that they want. It’s so much better than that place you all live in, ‘Reality’, which is just shit. But onto Graham Dorrans.

Over recent weeks and months Graham ‘Get Your Hands Off Him He’s Ours’ Dorrans has become the Championship’s star attraction and a fixture in daily transfer speculation. Genuine talent, somewhat unusually, is the foundation for Dorrans’ success. He is one of a new breed of centre midfielders with the ability and inclination to take opposition players out of the game with dribbles as well as passes.

At 22, Dorrans’ development is far from complete, but it started at Livingston. In his five years there the influence of several different managers must have been significant on the young Dorrans, however, the most interesting of these managers’ effects to consider is that of Paul Lambert. Lambert played alongside Dorrans (at least in training) in the ‘05-’06 season and coached him in the next. As the first British player to win a Champion’s League and the closest thing Scotland has had to a world-class midfield player in a number of years, Dorrans could hardly have failed to have been inspired and impacted upon by Lambert.

Like Lambert and most players who reach the higher echelons of footballs sliding scale, Dorrans’ desire, alongside his immense talent, is fundamental to his success. He plays for a Championship club so any assertions about his mentality are mainly conjecture – they aren’t supplemented by round-the-clock media coverage of his training patterns, but his resilience in recovering from serious injury midway through his first season as a West Brom player and pushing his way into a team full of established midfielders like Robert Koren and Jonathan Greening, suggests he wants ‘It’ enough to get ‘It’.

Watching the Champion’s League this week with the West Brom game as a brief interruption, it was easy to imagine Dorrans slotting into most of the teams involved – a realistic enough possibility given Arsenal’s recent interest. At that level, midfield is about creative flare meshed with defensive steal: Dorrans has both. Pace is a necessity: Dorrans is quick. He even provides a goalscoring threat, with 13 goals in 38 games already this season. Patently he’s not there yet, but it’s not a massive leap.

Still though, a move away from West Brom isn’t a decision that he should take lightly. If Arsenal, a team that regularly achieves 60% of Premier League possession, really were interested, then he should go. If a team like Sunderland, mid-table battlers, came in for him, then he would do well to consider that West Brom (hopefully a Premier League prospect by then) have developed a style of play that suits his game and teams like Sunderland have not.

For now it is West Brom fans who continue to enjoy this young player and look forward to seeing what more he is capable of.

Category: Match Preview, West Brom News