PFA Player of the Year

[drunkenmaster]

Didn't want to make a new thread, PFA shortlist

Vardy, Mahrez, Kante, Kane, Payet, Ozil and........... Wayne Rooney.

I keep pointing out he gets picked for England and for Utd for commercial reasons, this is it. Wayne Rooney has been amongst the worst strikers in the league this year, however a crap striker at Villa will have 1/10th the number of chances to shoot that a crap striker at Utd/top 6 team will have. Top 6 teams generally also win more penalties which has also helped Rooney out. Absolute embarrassment he's on the list, probably 100 players at least who deserved to be on the short list more than Rooney, actually a lot more than that.


Young players list is Kane, Alli, Lukaku, Barkley, Butland, Coutinho.

Really should be Alli, first season in the league, second full season, he's been fantastic. Should be Kane, Alli or Lukaku winning it though. Barkley/Coutinho are painfully inconsistent to the point they don't come close to deserving it over the others. Butland I really haven't seen enough of to know if he was really that good this year.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Martial has had a good season, but pales in comparison to the rest on the list.

He doesn't pale in comparison at all, Coutinho is a not great player. He scores a cracking goal then has 3-4 woeful games. He has taken 100 shots to get 8 goals. He's taken about 100 shots in each full season for Liverpool, he's wasteful as hell with one of the worse strike rates in the league of any player taking a fairly high number of shots(say over 30).

Barkley is equally inconsistent and also scored 8 but in 89 shots, 3rd full year in the league, wasteful, constantly makes the wrong decisions. They both usually play relatively central behind the striker and get to follow into the edge of the box onto loose balls and pick up goals, in fact I'd say the majority of Coutinho's goals in the past 4 years have been of that type.


Martial plays wide left, it's his first year in the league, only second full season, he's 2 years younger than Barkley and 2.5 younger than Coutinho. He also has 8 goal but in 52 shots. So that is a goals/shots ratio of 1:12.5 for Coutinho, 1:11.1 for Barkley, and 1:6.5 for Martial.

Martial has also been largely excellent in each and every game I've seen where as Barkley and Coutinho have had incredibly poor games multiple times this(and every) season. Both of the other two play for teams that have scored considerably more than Utd this year, neither of which have had to put up with Rooney. Martial in the same positions as the other two and with actual strikers and a fluid offence to play around would have destroyed them both in terms of total goals.

In his third full season in this league he will make Coutinho/Barkley as they are today look extremely poor in comparison.

Lukaku has been a beast almost the whole season but is again significantly more experienced and playing the role he loves in a team that loves attacking. Butland is hard to compare, he's been good but he's played 3 full seasons previously at other clubs and is 23, probably being over rated a bit as a 'young' player.

Kane and Alli have simply been exceptional in their positions. 10 goals from 74 shots and 9 assists in his first year in this league starting at 19 is phenomenal for Alli. Kane while excellent goal scoring and his overall movement, work rate are also excellent is still older with more experience at this level than Alli so the right person won.

But Martial should have been 3rd on the list, with all the things people consider negatives, inexperience, second full season, first year in this league, first year in a new country, he's been fantastic despite those things.

Coutinho and Barkley, in their third/fourth seasons in this league, older, way more experienced, they've been wasteful, selfish, make the wrong decisions constantly have woeful games far too often, neither should be on the list at all.

I'd probably put Origi or Can in ahead of Coutinho just looking at other players at Liverpool.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Butland was (rightly) nominated. De Gea is a good shout but Smalling can get behind Alderweireld and Dier in the queue for a nomination.

While Smalling has had a good season he's being wildly over rated, his big mistakes are being forgotten and he's been absolutely on where near, Alderweireld, Huth, Morgan all trounce him in terms of consist CBs this season. Smalling nominated for player of the year, lol.

Williams, Dier, everyone at Leicester, West Ham have had some epic defensive performances from their CBs. There are probably a half dozen CBs minimum let along another half dozen fullbacks I'd rate ahead of Smalling this year.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Didn't read that wall of text past the first line. I was thinking purely of the player of the season, not young player of the season, my bad.

In which case, yeah he probably should've gotten a shout for young player of the season. Wouldn't have won it mind.

Nope, Alli has been utterly ridiculous this year. I actually wonder about Martial, he signed for Utd on a ridiculous fee with a presumably huge wage at a time when Utd just suck. I think he would have scored way more and developed more as a player at almost any other top club. If Mourinho is in charge next year... the dire turgid football he produces really isn't going to suit Martial nor help him develop into a consistent top attacking player as part of a fluid offence.

You look at guys like Coman and Costa at bayern who have been effectively unleashed in the perfect team to help them show what they can really do. Utd today are like a shackle holding Martial down and I can't see that Mourinho's style won't hold Martial back in the coming years. Just a shame as he looks like he could be something really special and his most important development years could be stuck in entirely the wrong team to help him shine.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Spurs are a young side, they've had more of a later surge and they will probably still finish with scoring more than Mourinho's Chelsea did in the previous two seasons. Mourinho's Chelsea managed to score what 18 goals in 16 games before he got fired.

You're also attributing everything that happened under Mourinho's years to Mourinho alone, he inherited most of the squad and bought two of the most in form attackers in Europe to buy the form he couldn't train into the squad and then mostly produced dire football.

His football still is dire, you can attack all game long and score 2, or counter attack twice, spend the rest of the game in your own half and still score 2. His sides tend to be the latter type. I've watched every team he's managed for years, Inter(less games but still quite a lot), Real(almost all of them), he consistently takes over teams and makes them worse over time in an attacking sense. Chelsea and Real attacks when he took over were both fluid offences and three years later both teams looked like a team of disjointed individuals upfront before he left because the owners didn't want him at those clubs any more. He did the same again to Chelsea and he left Inter looking like they had no idea how to attack.

Even last year by half way point Chelsea had 41 goals, 14 conceded and 46 points, second half of the season they scored 32(at a time where everyone safe and with nothing to play for collapses, Swansea every year, Stoke, etc, this is the high scoring period of the season for top teams against smaller squads with nothing to play for), conceded 18 and got 41 points. The results were worse, the goals were already dropping off and buying the form of Costa and Fabregas worked for a while before his boring style caused both to drop off significantly in the second half of the year. Outside of the freak that is Ronaldo I can't think of many strikers or attackers who improved under Mourinho rather than got worse and wanted out or Mourinho left and the players all improved.

As for prevalent opinion and regurgitating it, I think you'll be hard pressed to find anyone on here who believes I follow the herd when it comes to opinions. I held this opinion and stated it donkeys years ago before anyone else remotely started to question Mourinho. People still rated him the best manager in the world when producing some of the single worst games of football I've ever seen with Inter in the CL while I was saying he destroys teams and has a style of football that doesn't last and breaks up the teams effectiveness.

I don't think Utd at all need a long term manager, so I have no idea where you got that from. If a manager is good and can adapt then fine, if he can't, so what. I simply said that I don't think Martial will thrive or develop anywhere near as much as he could under the style of football Mourinho plays.