A champion team is not necessarily a team of champions, so to award individuals with baubles seems a little strange in football, especially in this Premier League season, where the leading team has built its success very much on a fantastic group ethic.
But even the most unified teams have superlative players, stars upon whom they rely more so than others, and it can’t hurt to recognise these individuals. But what criteria should we base our selections on? Is the fortune of the team to be taken into account, or simply the isolated form of the player?
Are the hard currencies of goals and assists the only yardstick to use, or do we try and look a little deeper, statistically speaking? How much of a certain player’s success is propped up by the thankless work of another?
Intuitively, the sense is that candidates for the individuals awards must run on a platform comprised both singular and team success. Furthermore, unless their isolated statistics are historically prodigious, the fact that their team has struggled in spite of their personal triumphs must count against them.
Romelu Lukaku, for instance, has scored the third-most goals in the league so far this season, and yet Everton wallow in 14th place, with a home winning percentage (25%) 15 percentage points worse than the league average (40%). His scoring, stellar though it may be, is clearly not enough to compensate for the callow shortcomings of his team generally (not that the work of one player really could counter-balance a team as defensively inept as Everton).
So, the most important – though ‘important’ may be the wrong word – players, sourced from teams in, let’s say, the top seven of the Premier League. Immediately, that delivers to us a dilemma: Jamie Vardy or Riyad Mahrez?
The selecting a candidate from the rest of the top seven is fairly straightforward: Harry Kane from Tottenham, Mesut Ozil from Arsenal, Sergio Aguero from Manchester City, Chris Smalling from Manchester United, Dimitri Payet from West Ham United, and Virgil van Dyke from Southampton. But in Mahrez and Vardy, we have two players, responsible for, respectively, 27 and 25 goals (counting both goals scored and assists), who have propelled the most unlikely title tilt in Premier League history.
Vardy broke the consecutive games scoring record earlier in the season, and Mahrez, who cost 500,000 pounds sterling, has more goals and assists than Gareth Bale this season. But, for the sake of clarity, in the swift manner one might rip off a band-aid, let’s just pick Jamie Vardy and move on.
Now, almost immediately van Dyke and Smalling stand out as defenders. They have been the most consistent performers at their respective clubs, and the fact that United hold the second-best defensive record in the league is thanks in no small part to Smalling’s fine work this season.
This is not to malign those admiral fellows stationed further back, but tackles and clearances hardly get the heart pumping. Besides, few would argue for them to be included in any final shortlists, with both of their clubs plodding through hot-and-cold seasons, so, with a salute, we can bid them farewell.
Perhaps the most interesting debate to be had concerns Dimitri Payet and Mesut Ozil, and which one has had the better season. The question is well-timed, with the Hammers and Gunners jousting out a superb 3-3 draw on the weekend.
Ozil is having one of the most supremely obliging seasons in Premier League history, and still has more than enough time to break Thierry Henry’s single-season assists record of 20 (Ozil has registered 18 as of this weekend). But, just as he did for the stretch in Saturday’s match in which Andy Carroll scored his hat-trick, Ozil can flash in and out of games.
He is the league’s most skilled, subtle manipulator of the football, but his team’s title challenge has withered over the last six matches; we must remember, if Leicester do go on to seize the premiership, that Arsenal were two points behind them at one point, having beaten the Foxes on Valentines Day. If Leicester defeat Sunderland on Sunday, the gap to Arsenal yawns out to 13 points.
West Ham – however much their own pursuit of a Champions League was hindered by the two dropped points to Arsenal – have enjoyed a rollicking 2015-16, smashing through their pre-season expectations and generally having a grand old time. At the very centre of what has suddenly become a hugely entertaining, dangerous attacking unit is Dimitri Payet, a player blessed with dazzlingly quick feet and an even quicker mind.
Approaching double figures in both league goals and assists, Payet has rarely been left off the weekly highlight reels, with free kicks, nutmegs, and other such wondrous things generously garnishing a resplendent debut season in England.
If Ozil and Payet were to be removed from their teams, it’s much harder to imagine West Ham doing anywhere near as well as they have with Payet in their holster. But what of the strikers on the shortlist? Sergio Aguero, while having an excellent season, is a victim of his own high standards; he’s scored 20 or more goals in all but one of his five seasons in Manchester, so this season is unexceptional in that regard. And his team has also sloped through this season, ensconced numbly as they are in a pre-Pep purgatory.
Harry Kane leads the league in scoring, and has given Spurs the razor-edge they have required to thrash out the league’s best goal difference. The Englishman’s finishing is crisp and direct, and his movement is constant, a high-shouldered, lethal centre forward, who is easily Mauricio Pochettino’s most crucial player.
But Vardy, with his record-setting turn in 2015-16, leading Leicester City pointedly to the summit of the Premier League, must be considered the favourite for the bauble. His goals have dried up recently, but the glow from the explosive scoring run he had between August and December still illuminates this season, a steaming, spouting geyser of attacking intensity that gave Leicester the forward momentum they’re coasting to the title on now.
He has played his way into near-automatic selection for England’s Euro 2016 campaign, and his story – being adapted by Hollywood folks as we speak, no doubt – is truly remarkable. Any individual accolade Vardy garners will be dwarfed if his team win the title, but, as far as this discussion goes, few would argue if Vardy was crowned Player of the Season.
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