De Vries went down under challenge from Martin Rowlands when the two sides met at the Liberty last season leaving the Swans to the rest of the game with Alan Tate in goal.<\/p>\n
Tate went on to keep a clean sheet but it was a matter of weeks before De Vries was back between the sticks and keeping goal for the Swans as he showed little effects of the challenge that could have been far worse.<\/p>\n
And on the week where he was praised for his distrubution from the back by Sean O’Driscoll, De Vries looked back on that moment with Rowlands and told the Western Mail \u201cIt\u2019s happened to many goalkeepers<\/p>\n
\u201cI was lucky not be concussed but you do see it because as a goalkeeper you can\u2019t be afraid and after horrible injuries like Cech\u2019s it can be a mental thing.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd I\u2019ll be honest and say it did concern me. But I was lucky to have the Inaki Bergara, the goalkeeping coach at the time, to pull me through.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was straight into surgery and actually back on the training field two days later. But the important thing was that Inaki didn\u2019t waste any time with me, talking me through things and making sure it didn\u2019t affect me.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically he told me I\u2019d suffered the worst thing that can happen to a goalkeeper on the field \u2013 and that I had come through it.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou have to be really strong in those situations and in the end it proved good for my development that I came through it.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd when it came to that next one-v-one I had no fear \u2013 it wasn\u2019t even in my mind. There was nothing different for me.\u201d<\/p>\n
And on O’Driscoll’s comments, the goalkeeper added<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s brilliant to hear that kind of thing,\u201d said de Vries, who admitted he was an outfield player until his mid-teens and only took up life between the sticks when he reluctantly went along to a goalkeeping contest and won the national finals.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve always been proud of that side of my game. That\u2019s why Roberto Martinez first brought me in because I have that to my game.<\/p>\n
\u201cI work on my distribution every day because I can help set up counter-attacks with the right pass. And I am comfortable with that because I used to play as a centre-half \u2013 it means I\u2019ve only gone back one line in the formation so I\u2019m OK with through balls or even headers!<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a Dutch thing, total football where the idea is that the goalkeeper is almost a sweeper.<\/p>\n
\u201cJohan Cruyff was big on it where the goalkeeper was the 11th outfield player and it was just as much about keeping possession as anything else.<\/p>\n
\u201cFive clean sheets is a good record but it\u2019s not the most satisfying thing I get from games.<\/p>\n
\u201cSometimes you can make one or two good saves but you\u2019re not really involved. A clean sheet is about the back four or five, the whole team because everyone has to play their part.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
De Vries went down under challenge from Martin Rowlands when the two sides met at the Liberty last season leaving the Swans to the rest of the game with Alan Tate in goal. Tate went on to keep a clean sheet but it was a matter of weeks before De Vries was back between the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":453,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16775","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/453"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16775"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16775\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16775"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16775"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jackarmy.net\/wp67\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16775"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}