I’m with you here, been huge on him since seeing him in person last year.
I like Day-Wicks a lot, but Nguyen is my guy
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I notice that the commentators in his match clips call Nguyen “Nyoo- un.”
Years ago in Sydney I was responsible for organising translators for CentreLink phone calls to non-English-speaking clients. Vietnamese were prominent among them, and one of the commonest surnames - the Vietnamese version of Smith or Williams - was Nguyen.
The Vietnamese translators taught me to pronounce it like “win”, but with an “ng” in front of it. “Ngwin.” (Of course that might be a Vietnam regional pronunciation.)
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Reminds me of this cracker
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Lightning fast and agile absolutely blitzed the state combine and can find the footy with ease.
Needs to tidy up he’s kicking but it isn’t a huge concern for me but can roost the ball as shown by he’s running goal from fifty in the vfl
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That’s how all the Nguyen’s I’ve known have pronounced their name as well. But obviously I’ll leave it to Jayden to let us know how he pronounces it!
Looks like he has a lot of tools, quick, agile, competitive, just a little small and slightly scrappy skills. Hopefully he can tidy those up and be a real bonus.
I like to make my decisions on draftees based on small 5 minute highlights package… Looks great in traffic but looks very, very suspect by foot.
Vietnamese is a very hard dialect to speak. You could try saying the same word 50 times and still get it wrong.
Go well Nguyen!
A friend pronounces her name similarly but more ng-wen.
But I have also heard others I don’t know well pronounced as noo-un, so have always been unsure about that.
For a football player, that seems a very conventional way to spell Jayden.
Shouldn’t it be Jaedyyn or something?
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What position does he play?
Nguyen and Unwin kind of cancel each other out.
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J-Den
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Positionally, its pretty open right now and one of the reasons why he slid into the rookie draft.
Bottom ager, he only played as a small defender.
Top ager, he mostly played as a small defender, but started to branch out more towards the end of the season.
So here’s the thing. He was excellent in his bottom age season. Normally, the bottom agers will take the peripheral roles allowing the top agers to shine in their draft year. So Nguyen playing small defender made sense as a bottom ager. But then I like everyone else was expecting him to step into a more prominent role this year. Play on ball, some forward perhaps, even on a wing. But for the first half of this season, he was stuck in the back pocket again… and it seemed to effect him. He wasn’t as good there as he had been the year prior, seemed to have lost his mojo.
He was called up to play a couple of champs games and it was a mixed bag. He looked to be having fun with the lads on the sideline, he got to play on a wing for a bit, but his performances were just okay it felt like he wasn’t super confident in himself at the level.
Towards the end of the year things started to change, I don’t know what the catalyst for that was. He played a game in the forward line and looked good there. He played a game in the VFL for the bombers and stepped up really well, looked confident. He played as a midfielder finally in the Cannons last game of the season and was best on ground which really makes you frustrated at the coaches.
He’s small… you may differ with me in my assessment but I feel as though his height will cause matchup issues if we play him in defense. I feel like he’s probably going to have to become a winger, forward flanker or pressure forward. And because he barely played in those roles at all the last two seasons we really don’t know how capable he’s going to be in adapting his game.
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Whoever published that “highlight” video has done the boy reeeeaaaaal dirty.
The vast majority of possessions were handoffs to a team mate in worse position or shocking turnovers/skill errors.
I’ll wait for more evidence before warming up the cannon.
BRO.
Holy moly - no offense but I must have said a billion times now that I don’t make highlights videos.
Each of these is a single game, and its every interaction that Jayden has with the play, good or bad.
I dunno, I really never thought it would be that difficult to figure out.
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More than happy they park him in the VFL for a year and let him marinate with a lot of game time across half back and maybe some midfield time.
Love to see how he goes developing.
It’s interesting when assessing draftees we often forget that they could have things off field affecting their performances.
I think your right with he’s position at the next level backline will be difficult for him it’s not like he is a Caleb Daniel with elite skills with that in mind he should be starting the vfl forward of the ball and try and use those natural attributes of speed and toughness to make it as a pressure forward like a faster version version of guelfi
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