Adrian Durham heaped praise on West Ham defender Issa Diop after watching his display in the 1-0 win v Tottenham.
The French defender played the full 90 minutes of the fixture, and was hailed by Durham for his performance on talkSPORT.
The talkSPORT broadcaster uttered the word amazing about Diop’s display and even compared him to Patrick Vieira.
“When you go back and think about it, at the start of the season I don’t think we had any real expectations,” said Durham (talkSPORT,17:34,29th April).
“At 22 years of age, we saw him stride through ‘Vieira-like’, and if he’d have just put the final touch on that run, it’d have been goal of the season,
“This is a centre-half making a run like that, amazing.”
OPINION
Diop was arguably one of the most important players in the side for Pellegrini’s men on Saturday, not only for his defensive performance, but his unbelievable attacking performance from centre-half too. Considering, as Durham mentioned, there wasn’t too much expectation surrounding the French international at the start of the season, he has evolved into one of West Ham’s best defenders. As well as keeping the Spurs attacking line completely silent, the 22-year old managed to almost net the goal to seal the victory for good, after blitzing past the entire Spurs defence, only to see his shot saved by Hugo Lloris. It is becoming more and more common in modern football for central defenders to be handy on the ball, and make darting runs forward to help their sides, and Diop could be West Ham’s answer to this shift in footballing dynamic. Hopefully, the defender will be able to show the same sort of form in the remaining games this season, and take his performances into next season also.
