BBC Radio 5 Live<\/a> last week, midfielder Jack Hinshelwood said the fighter – understood to be German Christian Eckerlin – had been brought in to help players “block from corners better” earlier this season.<\/p>\nBrighton have conceded 13 goals, a third of their overall total, from set-pieces this campaign and travel to Newcastle United – the fourth-most prolific scorers of set-piece goals and one of the Premier League’s tallest teams – on Saturday (15:00 BST).<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“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.<\/p>\n
“There are different ways of being resilient, of using a block, different techniques to win one-v-one duels – especially at set-pieces.<\/p>\n
“An MMA fighter always has one-against-one duels. They always need to find a way to beat an opponent. We try to get ideas from other sports and this was an idea we used. If it stays in a player’s mind then that’s always a positive thing.”<\/p>\n
Only four teams in the Premier League have scored fewer than Brighton’s 13 goals from set-pieces this season.<\/p>\n
“As a club we’re not known as being so dominant in set-pieces,” Hurzeler added.<\/p>\n
“We’re never known as recruiting only for set-pieces so therefore we need to find ways to be innovative. We need to find ways that we can’t be beaten that easily against taller teams.<\/p>\n
“That’s what we face against Newcastle. We might not be that physical but there are always ways you can defend and attack in one-on-one duels at set-pieces and that’s why we try to use techniques from MMA as well.”<\/p>\n
Hurzeler himself has previously trained with British boxer Harlem Eubank<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Brighton have scored 27% of their Premier League goals from set-pieces this season Fabian Hurzeler says he does…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":642916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,55835,311264,786,311266,311265,785,1526,1614,146120,85],"class_list":["post-642915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-brighton","tag-fabian-hurzeler","tag-fighting","tag-jack-hinshelwood","tag-mixed-martial-arts-fighter","tag-mma","tag-newcastle-united","tag-premier-league","tag-set-pieces","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=642915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/642915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/642916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=642915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=642915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=642915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"Lewis](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/16f9e4d743f66d7bd0fec1093859b33a.jpeg\"\/)
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