About three weeks ago we reached a point in the season when every man and his blog was giving their rankings, best XIs and players of the season. Naturally a lot of those featured players from other teams, so could be dismissed as irrelevant. We at The Shed End like to take a little time to ruminate on such things, so finally, after a liquor-fuelled hiatus of a few years, I can bring you the Shed End's Player of the Season Awards.

Any newbies may be unaware that in addition to being the forum's most hilarious, second-most handsome and eighteenth-drunkest poster, I also maintain an Excel spreadsheet which tallies all votes cast in our per-match MOTM threads. All the punch cards have now been processed, and I now finally have the numbers from this most topsy-turvy of seasons.

Even with a dataset as small as ours, a season with a change in management (and a range of contrasts from 'quite good but flawed', to 'totally inept', to 'still kind of inept but solid', to 'apparently the best team in Europe') offers us an opportunity for introspection. One useful factor is the comparability in fixture quantity - Lampard managed 29 games, and Tuchel 30. Pleasingly enough, each of the 28 players who featured for us this season picked up at least 1 vote, with the exception of poor Loftus-Cheek's unfortunate cameo vs Brighton in the season opener.

 

Some introductory stats:

Total number of games: 59

Total number of votes cast: 1772

Average number of votes per game: 30.03 (23.59 under Lampard, 32.27 under Tuchel... bunch of glory hunters.)

Game with highest number of votes cast: Man City (N CL): 61

Game with lowest number of votes cast: Tottenham (A LC); Rennes (A CL): 12

 

As a result of the average vote numbers being higher than during previous seasons, I've opted for only two measuring sticks: total number of MOTM awards, followed by the overall number of individual votes as a tie-breaker. The largely vestigial 'points' system has been discarded as a result of players no longer being able to win awards when only picking up two or three votes. The lowest individual winning total was Zouma with 4 (vs Tottenham in the League Cup), however this was really an anomaly. It also meant that joke/tactical votes had less of an effect, although I did notice that Jorginho's eight votes under Lampard came in seven separate matches. No comment...

I don't think anyone will be too surprised by individual players performing drastically better or worse following the switch between managers. Even the perenially underappreciated (in MOTM threads at least) Azpilicueta picked up a bit:

So here's what the table looked like under Lampard:

And here's what it looked like under Tuchel:

 

You will probably note, as a result of his finishing first in both halves of the season that:

 

Mason Mount is The Shed End's 2020/21 Player of the Season.

 

While I agree with the result (which is quite possibly a first for this), I did feel a little bad for Kanté, who only missed out by 16 votes and also strolled the awards for both CL semi-finals as well as the final.

 

So via most MOTM awards:

1) Mount (8 awards)

1) Kanté (8 awards)

3) James (5 awards)

4) Mendy (4 awards)

 

Via total votes:

1) Mount (257 votes)

2) Kanté (241 votes)

3) Havertz (120 votes)

4) James (111 votes)

 

Other stats (feel free to stop reading at any point):

 

Premier League:

Mount leads the way with 6 awards, followed by Kanté with 4, then James, Mendy, Pulisic and Chilwell all with 3. Interestingly we only won 2 of the games Mount won the award for - including the capitulation at the King Power and the ludicrous 3-3 against West Brom.

Champions League:

Unsurprisingly Kanté was ahead in this one with 4 (all of them knockout games including both semis and the final). Mount won 2 (also both knockouts), then 1 each for James, Mendy, Ziyech, Silva, Jorginho, Gilmour and Giroud. I'm sure you can guess which game Giroud won his award for...

FA/Cup League Cup:

I'm throwing these two together as our League Cup campaign was only two games long. Zouma and Abraham got 2 each; Havertz, James, Hudson-Odoi and Azpilicueta (the semi against Man City) all got one each.

 

So Mount and Kanté are both streets ahead of the rest of the squad. Even Kanté in second has more than double the number of votes of Havertz in third. The awards were more spread out than they normally would be: 20 different players won at least one MOTM award this season. Whether this is a result of us playing such a high number of games or as a result of the necessary rotation in such a compressed season I don't know.

This is the full table if anybody is interested:

 

Thanks for reading!

Brilliant @PloKoon13 and many thanks.

Now sit down, relax and pour yourself a stiff one. You deserve it.

I think people would have known the two obvious characters would lead the way but I didn’t imagine it would be by such a margin.

Great work as always ! Thanks for doing it. Rudiger and Christensen really step up their game under Tuchel. I also think we are very lucky to have the boy Mason Mount on our team, i just hope we don't burn him down so fast the guy needs rest. 

Ziyech and Hudson Odoi being so high on the All of the votes lists suprised me especially that Pulisic started a lot of games down the line, i think they both had a better season than Pulisic.

And when did Caballero even play lol ? can't remember.

Seeing Azpilicueta 20th and only received two more votes than Kepa kinda hurt me inside.

Edited June 20, 20215 yr by DidierDrogbalala

2 minutes ago, goose said:

Now sit down, relax and pour yourself a stiff one. You deserve it.

Well... if you insist!

2 minutes ago, DidierDrogbalala said:

Great work as always ! Thanks for doing it. Rudiger and Christensen really step up their game under Tuchel. I also think we are very lucky to have the boy Mason Mount on our team, i just hope we don't burn him down so fast the guy needs rest. 

Ziyech and Hudson Odoi being so high on the All of the votes lists suprised me especially that Pulisic started a lot of games down the line, i think they both had a better season than Pulisic.

And when did Caballero even play lol ? can't remember.

Seeing Azpilicueta 20th and only received to more votes than Kepa kinda hurt me inside.

Caballero played 90 minutes in the League Cup game against Barnsley and received three votes for it (this is also the game in which Barkley received his four votes). He also played 90 minutes in the 3-3 away to West Brom that weekend but didn't receive any votes.

Other than in 2013/14 when he properly burst onto the scene (finishing 4th overall behind Hazard, Oscar and Willian) Azpilicueta has never received very many votes in the MOTM threads. A victim of being reliable but (usually) unspectacular I suppose.

Top man for doing this Ploks, great work.

I’m quite surprised the votes are very low compared to the visits here after the matches. 

Well done PloKoon for that🍻

Thanks for your hard work. Looking forward to voting next season 

great work @PloKoon13

it has to be between mount and kante based on the eye test as well....

20 hours ago, Mod Stark said:

Top man for doing this Ploks, great work.

I’m quite surprised the votes are very low compared to the visits here after the matches. 

People are too busy dissecting Jorginho’s performance to work out just why exactly it’s all his fault. 

Great job!