Dean Hammond

[Buzzer]

He made Bridcutt a much better player in the second season at the Amex. In the first season we were hopelessly exposed in the middle and Bridcutt's small frame didn't help especially with some of the much bigger teams we came up against...Saints, West Ham..

With Hammond doing the tidying up in the middle, it gave Bridcutt the freedom from his defensive duties to attack teams.

 

[Whitechapel]

He always garnered mixed opinion during his first spell at the club, but I felt that was down to him having to force his way in to a much loved midfield of Richard Carpenter & Charlie Oatway who had brought us so much success as a paring. The problem was Oatway was a hard-working scrapper and Carpenter chipped in with goals on a regular basis (Normally 25 yard rockets too) meaning that Hammond would always be compared to one or the other, when in fact his playing style wasn't similar to either of them. The fact he was a kid playing in an often terrible team was overlooked too. He finally won the majority of fans over, and left for Colchester who despite being in the league above us were clearly going backwards and most of our fans saw it as a sideways step.

However, I think a lot of the negatives views of him come from that game against Southampton in L1.

Does him acting like a grade A* prick affect his footballing ability? No.
Does it have an effect on how some of our fans view him? Almost certainly.

People see an unspectacular but solid player with an attitude problem and find it easier to label them as shit, rather than have an opinion that takes more than two words to summarise.