Who are our star performers?

If I had to award a Man of the Match for matches this season to date, it would go something like this:

4 – Adel Taarabt
4 – Jamie Mackie
3 – Anton Ferdinand
2 – Alejandro Faurlin
2 – Shaun Derry
2 – Daniel Gabbidon
2 – Radek Cerny
1 – Heidar Helguson
1 – Shaun Wright-Phillips
1 – Joey Barton
1 – Jay Bothroyd
1 – Akos Buzsaky

Now, I’m sure if I went over all of the matches again, I might come out with one or two different answers, but the performances fall into three categories: when we’ve played well, when we’ve played poorly and when we’ve been downright awful.

When we’ve played well, it’s been hard to choose a player, and often there are two or three candidates. When we’ve play poorly, there’s usually at least one primary candidate, maybe sometimes two, but when we’ve been awful there’s generally nobody you could highlight for such an accolade.

It’s harder to choose when we’ve played well, but this is the reason why the likes of Alejandro Faurlin and Heidar Helguson have lower figures than even I expected, but it’s simply because one or the other, or someone else, may have just pipped them on the day they also played extremely well.

So the figures can fool you, because some players made more telling contributions in poor matches leading to them getting the nod, whereas those who have played consistently well look less influential if they’ve been pipped by someone else. A better analysis would be to pick the top three players from every match, but I won’t be doing that for the sake of this post.

I think our player of the season to date has been Alejandro Faurlin followed closely by Heidar Helguson. After that, the men that next fall into the list are Adel Taarabt, Jamie Mackie, Anton Ferdinand and then probably Luke Young and Armand Traore would get a potential mention too, and those latter two don’t even make my MoM list but are generally an important component for the team to help it tick over and work.

On the other hand, it also shows that our players from last season have dominated the performances overall. The fact that Taarabt and Mackie lead the charts tells its own story when you see that Shaun Wright-Phillips and Joey Barton have one apiece by my assessment.

I asked myself why Taarabt and Mackie led the charts and the answer I found was that because they either made more telling positive contributions in a game, or provided more effort than anybody else. Those two things are very different, but you’d expect the higher profile players to be hitting the mark in those areas far more often than they currently are.

There were five matches this season where I felt I simply couldn’t pick out any player and because the performances was just so poor and that’s an alarming number of games to be saying that.