'Says everything..': Sunderland boss makes Premier League prediction as youngster continues to impress

Mike Dodds has paid tribute to Trai Hume’s durability with the defender looking increasingly likely to end up as the outfield player with the most minutes this season.

Only Anthony Patterson has more league minutes than the 22-year-old so far and while Dodds says Hume will benefit from the summer break, he added that his peformance level makes it almost impossible to drop him from the starting XI.

Dodds says he thinks both Hume and international team mate Dan Ballard are going to draw interest from the Premier League in the future, such is the current level of their performance and consistency over the course of the current campaign.

“Trai is a real positive to the recruitment of this football club,” Dodds said.

“You sign him for, and I mean with his the greatest of respect, what is essentially peanuts in the modern-day market and for me he's one of the best full backs in the league. The fact that he can keep churning out games and minutes says everything about his mentality. He is going to need that summer break and he is one of the players who we are really mindful of internally, but I can't really take him out of the team because he is so influential to the team. He's a huge, huge asset and one the club needs to do everything to keep for as long as possible.

“I said to Dan a few weeks back that I saw him as a potential future international captain and Trai took real offence to that! So those two are going to have a little bit of a fight for that in the future,” Dodds added.

“If they stay injury free, they are Premier League players in waiting and they are going to accumulate a huge amount of international caps. They're both massively important to us and there is going to be a lot of interest at Premier League level if we don't get there ourselves at some point, because that's the quality they both have.”

Reports in Northern Ireland say a number of top-tier clubs are monitoring Hume’s progress, including Aston Villa and Napoli.