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5m ago10.55 EDTBrighton, who play at Newcastle on Saturday, have a new means of dealing with set-piece strong-arm tactics: MMA fighter Christian Eckerlin, a pal of Fabian Hurzeler, who said: “It was a couple of months ago. We brought him in because we spoke a lot about set-pieces, blocking, new trends in the Premier League. Therefore we tried to adapt to it as well,” said Hurzeler.“I don’t always want to be known as a club that is nice. In certain moments you need to be quite resilient in personal duels. There are different ways of being resilient, of using a block, different techniques to win one-v-one duels - especially at set-pieces.“An MMA fighter always has one-against-one duels. They always need to find a way to beat an opponent.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Guardian — Football.