PFA Player of the Year

being a leicester fan im pleased to see those 3 names but for me i would vote for kante

week in an week out he has performed and i cant remember him having one bad match so far ,it would be nice to see how many motm he has won this season .

most defensive tackles and interceptions in the prem the guy is a beast

yes vardy has done great but hes had a few spells where is has not scored and also mahrez has been outstanding but if you watch every game he can go long long spells without doing anything and at times tries to do to much ending up with him losing the ball .

if we do sell players at the end of the season then kante would be the one most fans wouldnt want to see go i believe the guy really does have it all
 
The award lost all legitimacy when Martial did not get nominated.

Forced to play out wide. Scores goals regardless. Looks like a genuine talent and elevates himself above the team.

the rest have all benefitted from playing in cohesive and functional teams.
 
It's crazy that Martial won best young player in Europe but doesn't even get nominated for the EPL one :D I'd argue one of De Gea or Smalling should have been nominated too, they've both been fantastic this year. Defenders and Gk's never get nominated because it's dumb though.
 
McBain said:
Martial has had a good season, but pales in comparison to the rest on the list.
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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.
 
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.
 
Tunney said:
Butland was (rightly) nominated. De Gea is a good shout but Smalling can get behind Alderweireld and Dier in the queue for a nomination. :p
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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.
 
McBain said:
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.
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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.
 
Mourinho doesn't play dire football. He plays to his sides strengths and doesn't think that you can go toe to toe with Barca and beat them at their own game. Wenger rocks up at the Nou Camp and says "Lets have an open game" and Barca score a few times and then just sit and relax as everyone says "oh, Arsenal were so close to beating them" because they scored a goal after Barca had relaxed and the game was already won.

Chelsea averaged nearly 2 goals a game last season when they won the title and they played good football. Have Tottenham and Leicester played good football this season because they have only scored 64 and 63 goals a piece so far and both of them have added quite a lot of goals in their last few games.

People just jump on the Mourinho is boring band wagon because its repeated so often. Yes he will play on the counter against a team who are better at attacking than his team. He will play for a draw in the first leg of a knockout game if he thinks it will give them a better chance of going through to the next round. It like he thinks that winning is more important than playing every game to entertain. Arsenal fans, would you prefer Wengers constant inability to change his tactics to the opposition and situation or would you rather win something.

Ferguson had United playing rubbish football for years near the end of his reign. No one seems to remember this because we still won titles but we were poor for a long time. We muddled through because fergie was astute and got the best out of his limited players. RvP won us the league and scored some of the best goals I have ever seen but that was still a season of poor football a lot of the time.

Most opinions in football seem to just be regurgitated based on the prevalent opinion at that moment. Apparently United need a manager to stay for the long haul so Mourinho isn't suitable. How long has Pocettino stayed at any club for? How long do City stick with their managers for? Barca? Real Madrid? Bayern?

Managers want to move these days it seems. It is because its hard to keep motivating the team with the same methods season after season or is it that they are able to move jobs more easily and managerial vacancies appear more often. Who knows but sticking with a manager for years who underperforms is retarded.
 
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.
 
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Yeah you don't follow the herd, that's for sure. You said Suarez and Sanchez were both chod. haha
 
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