For the joy of watching: MGW
For the essential impact: Filipe
For looking like a world-beater in the making: Danilo
For just being a goddamn herobastard who was always around when we looked decent: Yates
But the one who’s season impressed me the most is the guy we asked far to much of, but who nonetheless stepped up, grew, and delivered… take a bow, Brennan Johnson.
It's Gibbs-White. Unfortunate for Brennan that he's come close and not won for a second season in a row but there it is. Otherwise @noodle is about right although Serge needs to be well in the running as well for consistency across the season and pure fury.
Why is Navas (17 League games, 2 clean sheets) in the poll, but Henderson (18 League games; 6 clean sheets) not? Is this more of Twicky’s unreasoning antipathy to him? Twicky out. Boo.
It’s MGW by some distance. Honourable mentions to Brennan, Yatesey, Barry, Serge, Felipe. But it has to be MGW
For consistency from August-May, it has to be Lodi or Aurier. Probably Serge just edges it, although I've always had a soft spot for left-backs.
For me, Brennan and MGW's form fell away for a significant part of the season which takes them out of the running
No-one else has played enough due to injury, or only joining in January (Had he stayed fit, it would have been Yates comfortably)
(I think MGW will actually win the award - last year it went to fans' favourite McKenna when it should have gone to Yates, for example).
Everyone has had patches this season where they weren't at their best be it from injury or form but for me I'd pick Johnson. He's been our most consistent threat and offers something no one else does. He's also been involved in many big moments, point at Everton, winner at Southampton, goals against Leicester, winner against Leeds, goals against Everton and so on
Not that I've checked the data because that would take effort, but I suspect you might be right. Yates playing seems to correlate with more points. He is without doubt a Premier League player when some numpties reckoned he wasnt good enough for the third division.
26 points from his 25 games is an average of just over 1ppg.. which is bang in line with the team average (we are 37 from 37). He’s played in 6 of our 9 wins.. which is, again, statistically in line with his appearances.
Serge, on the other hand, played in 8 of our 9 wins. His 23 games yielded 32 points, at 1.4ppg.
Danilo is 16 points from 13, at 1.2ppg, playing in 4 of our wins. Given he didn’t get a run of full games until the saving flourish, that speaks to a notable correlation with results and/or playing when Serge plays.
The only other one I looked at was Taiwo, who looks comparable to Yates. I wouldn’t expect anyone else to have better numbers because all the good ones played too many games and so would cluster around the average. So, and this wasn’t what I was expecting, it’s probably Serge by a distance, with Baz a very creditable deputy.