One To Watch: Stuart Dallas

The second round of Championship fixtures will be upon us tomorrow and the Blues’ will be playing Leeds United at Elland Road in a 3pm kick off. Leeds will be a tricky opponent for Birmingham as they have had a good pre-season and with a new man in charge, they will be looking to have a fresh campaign.

As a follower of most teams in the Championship, I have seen a lot of players in the flesh and seen how they boost teams in person. When this week’s one to watch cropped up, I was certain who I would choose and the man that I have gone for is Dallas. Stuart Dallas. Despite tough competition from Taylor and Mowatt, I think that Dallas could be the danger man and the player that we really have to watch out for.

The first reason for this is that I believe our full backs to be one of the weakest areas defensively. Shotton is best suited to centre back in my humble opinion and therefore that leaves Caddis and Grounds as the two full backs. Both of them to me, look like they’re tiring and they lack a lot of defensive qualities. Albeit, they are good to have in the squad and I feel that they do have skills that we need however they are certainly a point of weakness.

Our wingers do not tend to track back with any great affect as seen by Cotterill’s lack of ability to clear the ball against Cardiff leading to an abysmal miss by their player. So with this lack of help, our full backs become isolated and often open to exploitation by advancing wing backs and full backs.

Dallas, despite looking stocky, is deceivingly fast and has the pace to get beyond a lot of players. His mind is just as quick as he likes to play the one two pass with the striker before attacking and this often bewilders defenders. Due to this cleverness, he is hard to mark. Get too tight and he will play a wall pass to his team mate; get too far away and he can whip a ball into the box for his striker to get onto. It’s tricky and therefore he will be hard to come up against.

He also does his defensive duties well by helping his full back so he will also stop us attacking. We like to attack down the wings and cross it in for the big man, Don, so therefore if he stops us from crossing, then it detracts from our main source of goals. This could be a big problem and I hope that it is addressed come what match day.