Kyle Walker
Kyle Andrew Walker
Date of Birth: 28 May 1990
Current Club: Burnley.
Previous Clubs: Manchester City, Tottenham Hotspur, Sheffield United.
Loan Clubs: AC Milan, Aston Villa, QPR, Sheffield United, Northampton Town.
International: England 96 appearances 1 goal.
Trophies Won: European Champions League 2022/23. English Premier League 2017/18, 2018/19, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24. UEFA Supercup 2023/24. English FA Cup 2019, 2023. FIFA Club World Cup 2024. English League Cup 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021. Community Shield 2018/19, 2019/20. English Championship 2010/11.
Kyle Walker is the living embodiment of how you do not need to be a great player to be part of a great team and that great pace will cover a multitude of sins. He also shows how an over reliance on pace can cause your career to deteriorate quickly when that pace fades. Walker has good technique, but it is a drop from his early days when he had great technique, so much so that he would often take the set pieces at Spurs.
He has often been lauded as a great defender, but he was far from it, but he showcases how having blistering pace can be used as a get out of jail free card. Instead, Walker was big and strong enough to bully most wide forwards and had the pace to ensure he could get back into position very quickly. If he had spent a fraction as much time working on his defending as he did knobbing around, he could have been a great full-back.
The basics were there, particularly physically, but there is clearly a bit of a lack of intelligence, both in his game and general. If he had just a little more brain power, he could have been a far superior player and converted over to play centre-back at the top level, as his pace began to drop. Instead, Walker failed to learn how to read the game and so has been massively exposed in recent years.
Roastings on the pitch against top class players are one thing, but now he has dropped down to Burnley and is not even able to match the Clarets' wingers on the training pitch. Footage of him being taken apart by Luca Koleosho do make good viewing for the club or its fans. It is early days, but the move is looking like a big mistake.
Walker is just the biggest worry of a worrying transfer window for the Clarets, who have taken huge risks with their recruitment. None of their signings look to be anything but a huge gamble, Walker being the biggest of all.
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