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Your support makes all the difference.Eden Hazard won the PFA Player of the Year award on Sunday night and one would be hard pressed to find a more deserving winner.
The Chelsea winger has been the standout attacker for the best team in the Premier League this season, runaway champions who have been top of the table every week of the season except one – but statistically, the Belgium winger has struggled when compared to past winners of the award, scoring only 13 goals and adding eight assists in his 33 matches so far this season.
As many great individual seasons have been capped with the award there have been some curious voting patterns in the past 20 years, with a couple of winners seemingly crowned based on good spells of form at the time of voting or as some kind of lifetime achievement.
Perhaps too much shouldn’t be read into it, Hazard has been absolutely exceptional for Jose Mourinho’s team, but it still makes for interesting reading that his goal/assist total has only bettered six other players in the last 20 years, with two of those players, John Terry and Roy Keane, hardly known of their attacking exploits.
With just five matches left, Hazard has time to improve on his total of goals and assists, but looking back to when Les Ferdinand won the award in 1995-96 (with a 25 goals and nine assists for Newcastle), Hazard’s season doesn’t quite stack up on paper.
As the chart above shows, Hazard has only been better than Gareth Bale in (10-11), Ryan Giggs in (08-09), Steven Gerrard (05-06), John Terry (04-05), Roy Keane (99-00) and David Ginola (98-99).
In the last 20 years the Player of the Year has only won the Premier League in the same season nine times (likely to become 10 this season), so the ‘best player on the best team’ argument doesn’t really hold water. The first Bale award and Giggs winning it stick out as two of the most underserving winners in recent years.
Bale’s award in 2010-11 came largely off the back off a stunning run of form in the Champions League that season, as the Welshman single-handedly powered Tottenham past Inter Milan, with a brilliant hat-trick and then impressed against Real Madrid. But Spurs only finished fifth that season, with Bale scoring just seven goals and adding one assist.
Giggs’ award a couple of years previous came in a season that lacked any real standout player, Manchester United relying on strong defensive play and a rotation of Cristiano Ronaldo, Wayne Rooney, Dimitar Berbatov and Carlos Tevez to see them to the title. Giggs largely won the award as some kind of lifetime achievement award – at the age of 35, the Welshman started just 15 Premier League matches (coming on in another 13), six fewer than Park Ji-Sung. Nemanja Vidic was easily United’s best player that season.
Steven Gerrard, a year removed from inspiring Liverpool to the Champions League, was also excellent the year he won it, but Frank Lampard (16 goals, 15 assists) will probably feel hard done by as he was the top scorer and best player in a Chelsea team that cruised to the title.
David Ginola is the other who was fortunate to win the award, it feels strange to look back and see the Frenchman pick up the award playing for a Spurs team who finished 11 th – when Manchester United were just a couple of months away from winning the treble.
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