Romaine Mundle looks to have stepped things up for Sunderland this season.
The winger was brought in from Standard Liege in the January transfer window but struggled to make his mark early doors, managing only ten minutes of action in the final six matches.
However, Mundle went onto enjoy an impressive pre-season for Sunderland and looked very positive in his first start of the season against Preston North End in the Carabao Cup.
He still looks set for a spell on the bench though and will have to do a lot more to force his way into the starting line-up, with Jack Clarke and Patrick Roberts both ahead of him.
Despite some promising performances, Regis Le Bris believes Mundle still has one thing to improve on before he can be considered for a place in the team.
Le Bris is aware of ‘how high’ Mundle can go
Speaking to Sunderland Echo, Le Bris said: “You saw at Preston that he started on the left side, then moved to the right and finished in the ten position.
“Against Sheffield Wednesday he played on the right side. It’s a possibility because he has many qualities. He’s still young and needs to improve his consistency because he can be very high and then at other moments, it’s more difficult for him. This is the process of improving young players.
“His performances are still a little unstable, because I think wingers have a very different profile to other players. A centre back, for example, we like when they are stable and very consistent. Sometimes not so high, but never very low. For the wingers it’s very different because it is always 1-v-1 – I think the personality is different. They can be very high, so for example when Romaine played against Bradford he was very impressive and that was very interesting. After, maybe we have one, two games not quite at that level. But we trust him and believe in his quality because you can see how high he can go.
“The process to develop him is to find this consistency, and it starts during the training sessions. The main thing is this potential that you see, and then we develop the consistency. With some players it takes two months, six, one season… you don’t know. I hope it will be quick with Romaine!”
Can Mundle replace Jack Clarke?
Mundle only turned 21 years old in April, while his only real senior experience came briefly in the Belgian top division. He is still clearly very raw but has shown a lot of potental so far.
As Sunderland fans are so used to their squad being packed out with young, exciting players, it is very easy to forget how much development a player actually has left to do.
Mundle is far from the finished package and will arguably need another season of a few starts and even more cameos before we can start to see what he is capable of.
The Tottenham Hotspur academy graduate has shown glimpses of what he is capable of and could well be a replacement for Clarke in the future, but he certainly isn’t there yet and the club can’t put too much pressure on him if Clarke is to leave before the deadline.
The youngster could actually benefit from a loan exit, but looks extremely unlikely to happen given that he is Clarke’s current back-up, and is certainly ahead of Abdoullah Ba in the pecking order.