Vincent Kompany lauds 'unique' Brighton as Burnley bid to extend fight against relegation

The Seagulls provide the opposition for Burnley at Turf Moor today as the Clarets look to bounce back from last week’s defeat to Everton.

Sitting six points adrift of safety with only six games remaining, it really is now or never for Kompany’s men in their fading fight against relegation.

As for Brighton, they sit 10th in the table and will still have an eye on qualifying for Europe.

Even if they miss out, Kompany continues to be impressed by how Roberto De Zerbi’s side carry themselves like an elite outfit.

He said: “They’re a unique opposition in the sense that despite not necessarily being classed as one of the top six teams in this league, they’ve managed to establish themselves with all the habits of the top teams.

“They force opposition teams to adapt and for a team like Brighton to demand that from even the bigger teams, that’s really exceptional.

“That means it doesn’t matter whether the top six teams play against them, they have to adapt their game against them to play against Brighton and that’s a pretty special situation to be in.

“I give an example for us, when we were the best team in the Championship last year everyone had to adapt to play us. But in the Premier League none of the other teams wanted to do that because they won’t accept it, because they expect to have the better players.

“It took them a while to do that, I’m not saying it happened overnight, but within the space of five or six years they’ve managed to demand this and that’s pretty impressive.”

When asked what it is about Brighton’s style of play that makes them so unique, Kompany added: “Usually you can decide to line up in a zonal press and then if you line up like that, they will find the positions in between the lines and create overloads and find the free men.

“If you line up with a man-orientated press, they have movement patterns to create space in behind and a really good control of the tempo of the ball and the angles they need to make to maintain possession.

“They have a goalkeeper who is essentially an outfield player and when they lose the ball, they recover the ball really quickly. When they have to defend, they’re able to try and do so.

“It’s not happened overnight, it’s taken them years to do that, but they are where they are now because they’ve had this idea for a long time.”