Linked to another promising lower league right back

As I’m sure you’re all aware we’ve been linked with a number of players recently, the majority of which have featured in extremely short reports. I think we may have a winner with the latest from the Daily Star though. Here I present the whole article in all it’s glory:

“ASTON VILLA boss Paul Lambert is planning a £2.5m raid for Nottingham Forest full-back Chris Gunter.”

Impressive eh?! Now in all seriousness this is another promising link in my opinion, and while I’m not as high on him as I am Naughton, he’s still a more than capable right back, who can certainly make the step up to the Premiership. Living in Cardiff where he first made his breakthrough I saw a decent amount of him and heard bits about him and he was very highly rated back then.

Everton had a couple of bids turned down for the player, and it was eventually Tottenham who snapped him up. Things didn’t really work out for him there and he left for Nottingham Forest where he has gotten back on track, and is now one of the more highly rated right backs in the division. He’s been named in the PFA team of the year previously, and I suspect Lambert knows all about him, with Norwich having been linked previously.

This seems quite an easy link to make to me, and once again who knows how much truth is in this one, if any. As mentioned Norwich have previous links, and at the moment we seem to be constantly linked to right backs with a Tottenham connection. I wouldn’t be surprised if Pascal Chimbonda was next. Also the text in the Star piece doesn’t really tell us a lot, but £2.5 million would be a terrific price for the player if correct.

Like a number of young full backs (Gunter is only 22) he likes to get forward a lot and seems to be comfortable doing so. He can swing a decent ball in and is blessed with a terrific engine to get back and forth. He’s played a lot of football for someone his age, and is already approaching 40 caps for Wales so has a good amount of experience.

As mentioned £2.5 million would be an absolute bargain and allow us to strengthen other areas so that element is positive. I’m not sure if there is a massive difference between him and Lichaj, but Gunter does have a lot more experience considering he’s a year younger.

Once again, we’ll see how it plays out!

UTV.