FOOTBALL award season in England comes between the dawning of squeaky bum time in late March and the carefree jamboree of the closing weeks of the campaign in May.
Incidentally, four of the seven Premier League matchweeks with the highest overall pass completion rate have been the final day of a season, which is code for ‘please don’t fly into any tackles, I’m going on holiday next week’.
Back to the awards, though, and the current favourite to become the PFA Player of the Season is Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk. If he were to land it he’d be the first defender to win since John Terry 14 years ago. The Dutchman is not yet Liverpool’s captain, but he is a leader and he seems well on the way to becoming a legend.
Van Dijk was 125/1 to win PFA player of the year at the start of the season, now just 1/3!
— Dinesh Kumar (@DHardayal) March 14, 2019
The lack of defenders in the list of winners is unsurprising, if slightly disheartening. In a world of glamour forwards racking up Dixie Dean-style goal totals, or YouTube videos of every through ball your favourite attacking midfielder has played in the past 14 months, the earthiness of effective defending can seem like the enemy of entertainment.
Since Terry was crowned by the PFA in 2005 the only subsequent player to win who owes more to his defensive strength than his offensive prowess is N’Golo Kante in 2017, and that because winning the Premier League for two years in a row with two different clubs was evidence that not even his fellow professionals could ignore.
Kante also won the older-yet-ever-so-slightly-less-prestigious Football Writers Association Footballer of the Year award in 2017, and the writers have been writing off defenders for even longer than the PFA. Scott Parker’s semi-baffling win in 2011 notwithstanding, the last even slightly defensive player to win the FWA award was Roy Keane in 2000 (and this in a campaign when he hit five league goals for the final time in his career).
Yet go back to the era when live coverage of football was a rarity and suddenly defenders and goalkeepers abound. Four of the first five PFA Players of the Year were either hardened centre-backs (Norman Hunter in 1974 and Colin Todd in 1975) or goalkeepers (Pat Jennings in 1976 and Peter Shilton in 1978).
Proud to be named @premierleague POTM December! Thanks to all my teammates, staff and fans! pic.twitter.com/6vWcMqS8aP
— Virgil van Dijk (@VirgilvDijk) January 11, 2019
This was the 1970s, a decade we are frequently told was dominated by maverick attackers with their hands tucked inside their sleeves, but their peers were more enamoured with meat and potato defenders than the exotic Tony Curries of the world.
And it is here that van Dijjk has an advantage because not only is he, on current form, one of the most impressive defenders in Premier League history but he also looks like he is one of the most impressive defenders in Premier League history.
So many great defenders in the English top-flight have cast a shadow on their effectiveness by looking like wild yeoman, or regional solicitors. Van Dijk, in contrast, radiates grandeur and solidity in the same way that Jaap Stam, Rio Ferdinand and Nemanja Vidic did at Manchester United.
Attackers are seemingly subdued and beaten as soon as they see van Dijk’s name on Liverpool’s team sheet and the numbers back that up. It’s now more than a year since an opponent directly dribbled past van Dijk, a period that has seen him win 245 aerials and make 58 interceptions.
Liverpool have kept 24 clean sheets in that 52-game period, and it would have been 25 had van Dijk been able to deal with James Milner’s shanked pass at Craven Cottage last Sunday. Every superhero has a weakness; if that’s van Dijk’s, he should be okay.
The PFA award is voted on relatively early in the season, a reliably analogue process for the one industry that still venerates the fax machine. At that point, memories of Liverpool’s record of seven goals conceded in their opening 20 league games this season would have been fresh in the minds of everyone entitled to vote.
Had that ratio continued into January and February then Jurgen Klopp’s team would be course to challenge Chelsea’s Premier League record of 15 goals conceded in 2004-05, the very season that John Terry was player of the season. Terry’s combination with newly-arrived goalkeeper Petr Cech has striking similarities with Liverpool’s combination of van Dijk and summer signing Alisson Becker.
Liverpool won’t surpass early-Mourinho Chelsea in terms of goals conceded but they will end the season with more at the other end (they’re currently just two short with seven games left to play). This Liverpool team is a finely balanced act between defence and attack, something that only works when you have a defender of the quality of van Dijk in your midst.
“Take a walk around my centre-half, gentlemen, he’s a colossus!” That was Bill Shankly on Ron Yeats in 1961, but the point stands.
