That's not what his stats show though. Comfortably better stats than De Gea in sweeping, high claims and especially successful long passes. For a Ten Hag system he is looking good.
Quick FBRef + Excel comparison I pulled together after learning we were linked with Dubravka, just to see if De Gea is actually as woeful at the bolded bit as he looks to us (as in, I know he's awful at dealing with high balls, but I wanted to see how some other keepers in the league did in comparison). The results were sobering to say the least:
2019 - 2022 | Games | Crosses Faced | Crosses Stopped | Cross Stop % | Net Goals Saved / (Cost) (Post-Shot XG) | Net PSXG per game |
Dubravka | 77 | 756 | 50 | 6.6% | 15.5 | 0.20 |
Ederson | 108 | 533 | 42 | 7.9% | 2.5 | 0.02 |
Alisson | 97 | 636 | 59 | 9.3% | 10.8 | 0.11 |
Lloris | 96 | 907 | 50 | 5.5% | 11.8 | 0.12 |
Ramsdale | 109 | 920 | 73 | 7.9% | (3.1) | -0.03 |
Mendy | 64 | 450 | 32 | 7.1% | (0.3) | 0.00 |
Fabianski | 97 | 940 | 51 | 5.4% | 7.1 | 0.07 |
Martinez | 82 | 755 | 55 | 7.3% | 8.1 | 0.10 |
Schmeichel | 114 | 868 | 53 | 6.1% | 3.0 | 0.03 |
Pickford | 103 | 920 | 71 | 7.7% | (3.5) | -0.03 |
Henderson | 48 | 396 | 32 | 8.1% | 5.5 | 0.11 |
De Gea | 102 | 786 | 34 | 4.3% | 8.9 | 0.09 |
So not only is De Gea the worst out of all these keepers by a mile at dealing with crosses, which was expected for anyone with eyes who's seen us play in recent years, but he's also middle of the pack at shot-stopping (after controlling for appearances) which is his one strength. While Dubravka is actually leading the pack in terms of shot-stopping and comfortably ahead of De Gea at crosses.
Like I said in my last post, Dubravka should be an upgrade*.
*analysis doesn't account for passing and sweeping, mostly because I couldn't be arsed pulling the numbers together in my lunch break. But I would be extremely surprised to see De Gea significantly outperforming him - or most other PL keepers - in either metric.