With Jack Clarke set to miss Sunderland’s upcoming trio of games with Norwich City, Leicester City and Southampton, the focus will be again on who can step up and look to make a spot in Mike Dodds’ attack their own.
Last weekend against Swansea City, Dodds had hinted at an element of excitement and intrigue as to what Clarke’s absence could mean for his squad of players. That’s not an excitement at being without his leading goalscorer and standout Championship winger per se, more an excitement at being able to see what other players he has at his disposal and how they would cope without Clarke – after all, it may well be a reality in six months’ time at the start of next season.
Clarke’s absence through an ankle injury, which is set to see the 23-year-old sidelined for up to six weeks, has opened up a spot on the left of Sunderland’s attack, but it was an area which nobody really took advantage of against Swansea. In part, that may have been down to Dodds’ set-up at the Stadium of Light, with Abdoullah Ba fluctuating between being a wide left forward as part of a front three and a narrow forward alongside Nazariy Rusyn as a two.
The width we usually see from Clarke, and the areas he takes up, were not often in play here given the change of system, with wing-back Callum Styles tasked with trying to access that area of the field in what turned into a difficult debut up against Brazilian, Ronald Pereira Martins.
It was an afternoon which will have given Dodds plenty to think about heading into a difficult run of games. Dodds’ tactical experiment, by his own admission, did not pay off and may see Sunderland revert to type, as such, for the trip to Carrow Road. But that still opens up the question as to who will replace Clarke?
Dodds was keen to make sense of the situation in the aftermath of the defeat to Swansea by taking some of the pressure off any of his players who are handed Clarke’s starting spot by insisting nobody should be expecting them to replace Clarke, given the x-factor of the former Leeds United and Tottenham Hotspur winger this season.
“The thing with Jack is, Jack’s not just a good player for us. We’re probably talking about the best winger in the league, we’re not just talking about a one-off player. We’re talking about one of the best players in the league. Let’s be honest, you are never replacing Jack Clarke,” Dodds told We Are Sunderland.
“One thing I will say, and this is really important, when Jack Clarke came to the football club, Jack Clarke wasn’t Jack Clarke now. That’s a really important message and we have to make sure that message is really clear with the likes of Romaine and Abdoullah and Naz.
"I appreciate there will be some frustration amongst the fans, and I wish I could fast-forward time. But Jack Clarke, when he came to the football club, wasn’t the Jack Clarke we see now and that’s a message people need to, not understand because they’re fans and they want to win games of football, but from where I’m sitting we’ve got to make sure we work with the other players to make sure we get another Jack Clarke.”
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It's an interesting point, and one most will agree with. Nevertheless, this next six week period presents itself as a real opportunity for somebody to stake their claim and put themselves in the drivers seat, potentially, for next season when Clarke likely leaves the Stadium of Light.
But who should that be?
If we’re talking about relative time with the club, then Ba is the most primed to take over the role. The key debate around the Frenchman is whether he is suited to being an inverted winger off the left, as we saw in spells against Swansea, or whether he is better placed on the right where we see Patrick Roberts operate from, when fit.
Ba, 20, is just six months behind Clarke in terms of his arrival on Wearside and is into his second full season with the club having joined in the summer of 2022. Clarke has three years, in terms of his age, on Ba who joined Sunderland from French side Le Havre for an undisclosed fee on a five-year contract. Ba made 19 senior appearances in the 2021-22 season prior to his move to the North East and has represented France at Under-16, 17 and 19 level.
Yet by the time Ba was making his Championship debut for Sunderland from the bench in last season’s 2-2 draw with Watford at Vicarage Road, Clarke was making his 53rd Championship appearance having also gained experience in the Europa League. Although Clarke may have had what can be suggested as failed loan spells elsewhere in the Championship, and a difficult time with Tottenham, they were invaluable experiences.
What Clarke’s trajectory over the last few years can do is provide us with an idea as to where Sunderland’s young pretenders are in making a similar jump.
Take Clarke as a 20-year-old in the Championship, for example. After an encouraging period with Leeds, where he made 25 appearances during the 2018/19 campaign, including the play-off semi-final defeat to Derby County, he moved on to Tottenham for a significant fee where he was loaned back to Elland Road and then Queens Park Rangers where he made just 10 appearances in 2019/20. His third season, the one in question, came with another loan spell at Stoke City. Clarke featured 14 times for the Potters where he attempted just eight shots at goal to register an xG of 0.74 across 584 minutes of game time. Of those eight efforts, he had an accuracy of 38 per cent whilst 50 per cent came inside the opposition penalty area. He made just one assist, as per Fotmob.
Those are hardly numbers to have suggested Clarke would go on to do what he has done over the last 12-18 months with Sunderland, but how do they compare with Ba’s first season at this level, having joined as a 19-year-old? Ba featured for little under 800 minutes in his debut season which included eight games as a starter and 19 as a substitute. Within that, Ba registered nine attempts at goal, including his first goal for the club at Norwich in a 1-0 win, with an xG of 0.55. He added one assist to his name and had a shot accuracy of 33 per cent.
The jump made by Clarke from that season with Stoke to now, however, has been outstanding. Last season, his first full season at the Stadium of Light, the winger made 20 goal contributions in the shape of nine goals and 11 assists in the league – as well as two goals in the FA Cup.
Clarke also topped the Sunderland charts in stats such as progressive carries (183) and progressive passes received (308) and was Sunderland’s most featured outfield player at almost 3,800 minutes, as per Fbref. The winger has then taken that up another level this season with 19 goal contributions already to his name (15 goals and five assists), 270 progressive carries and 349 progressive passes received.
Clarke sits comfortably atop a number of the Championship’s leading rankings, and the image below, courtesy of StatsBomb, demonstrates just how good of a season he is having in comparison with the league average.
But where does Ba fit into this?
What’s encouraging is the Frenchman is developing on last year’s numbers. The 20-year-old has three goals to his name and four assists, which has him third in Sunderland’s squad when it comes to goal contributions behind only Clarke (19) and Dan Neil (eight). Ba has an xG of 3.66 and has had 29 shots at goal, with over 70 per cent of those efforts coming from inside the penalty area, with a shot accuracy of 31 per cent.
Ba has featured twice as much as he did last season as he currently sits at almost 1,600 minutes of game time, with 18 of his 31 appearances coming as a starter.
Ba has made 62 progressive carries so far this season, more than double that of last year where he totalled 25. The winger received just 44 progressive passes in 2022-23 whereas he sits second in the table this season behind Clarke with 182. He is third in successful dribbles this season with 31, behind Roberts (54) and Clarke (103), but that is already a significant improvement on the 13 he made last season. For reference, Clarke made 86 successful dribbles last season, Roberts 95.
While these numbers remain some way from Clarke’s astronomical efforts over the course of the last 12 months, they do show that Ba is improving from his arrival which adds substance to the approach Sunderland have when it comes to their recruitment.
At just under 1,600 minutes of football this season, Ba remains a long way from Clarke’s 2,925. And, although you would remain short of Clarke’s numbers this season, if you were to double Ba’s efforts in correlation to Clarke’s game time, he would become a clear second in most metrics for Sunderland this season which shows his progression over the course of the last 12 months.
Ba, of course, is not the only player vying for a regular spot in Sunderland’s starting line-up. The issue which has been facing Ba has been his constant rotation in terms of both starting and his starting position, having been utilised across the front three.
Romaine Mundle is another player who will throw his hat into the ring for Clarke’s spot both in the short and long-term future after arriving from Standard Liege in the January transfer window. Mundle, another export from Tottenham’s academy, impressed on his full debut in the defeat at Birmingham City and was, perhaps, unfortunate not to start against Swansea. The 20-year-old came off the bench and gave a decent cameo despite what was a challenging afternoon for Dodds’ side.
We Are Sunderland recently gave a thorough, deep-dive into Mundle’s attributes upon his arrival at the Stadium of Light, but can his cameo appearances so far tell us anything?
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Mundle has featured in just 141 minutes of action for Sunderland but has already made seven progressive carries and received 12 progressive passes. Prior to his move to Sunderland, Mundle made seven substitute appearances in the Belgian Pro League for Standard Liege where he received 20 progressive passes and recorded six progressive runs in 150 minutes of game time – similar numbers to what we have seen so far here, then.
If, hypothetically, you were to multiply those metrics by ten to reach a similar number of minutes as Ba, should Mundle continue on that trajectory, he would find himself ahead of Ba when it comes to progressive carries and would come in around fourth in Sunderland’s squad for progressive passes received. Albeit a very small sample size from his time at Sunderland, the charts below show Mundle’s data and how it stands up against both Ba and Clarke in their first full seasons with Sunderland
Ba and Mundle are likely to be the two in consideration to replace Clarke this weekend, and perhaps in the future if the 23-year-old is to leave the club in the summer, as is expected, with Roberts still likely to be considered the number one option on the right as an inverted winger.
There has been talk about Rusyn playing from that left-sided attacking role as well but so far his data has been more aligned with his role through the centre of Sunderland’s attack until Saturday’s defeat to Swansea where he operated from a wide right area.
The passing network from the defeat to Swansea shows how isolated Rusyn became on the right, having made just 55 touches, registering an xG of 0.29. Both Rusyn and Ba scored low when it came to both the xG chain and the on-ball-value (OBV) which is a metric used to objectively and quantitatively measure the value of each event on the pitch by assessing the change in probability of a team scoring and conceding as a direct result of the event.
Dodds is not expecting any of these players to replace Clarke in the here and now in terms of his numbers – how could he? But the opportunity to step up is certainly there as the winger, potentially, faces a race against time to feature again for Sunderland this season.
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