Man Of the Match - The season review!

By Tim Empson
August 5 2009

Well it has certainly been an interesting return to the big time for the Saints Management, Squad and followers. We finished in a creditable 8th position in the league, appeared in the semi final for the EDF cup, narrowly beaten by the winners and won the European Challenge Cup. This review, however, looks at the MoTM votes we have had over the year.

Appearances

As you all know the selection for inclusion on the man of the match list is based on fixed criteria. They players who are named in the starting 15 are included as long as they make it to the half time break. This causes a small number of anomalies where someone who comes on at half time makes a huge impression on the game but to be honest these are rare.

This season we have had 35 players who have made it to the MOTM list based on the above criteria. This is pretty much the whole squad. Of these three players appeared only once and three players appeared twice. These players were usually youngsters getting an opportunity or fringe players being used where needed. Two of these stand out, Rob Milligan who but for injury would have been one for the future (1) and Matt Lord (2) who was probably in his last season anyhow but was again cruelly cut short by injury.

At the other end of the scale two players (Bruce Reihana and James Downey) made it to the MoTM list on no less than 30 occasions - missing only five matches during the long season. The attached histogram gives a breakdown of the appearances over the season.

PlayerMatchesByNumber

It is interesting to note that you can make a team out of the 15 players with the most appearances and to some extent it defines our strongest team - with some exceptions. The team would be:

Soane Tonga'uiha

Dylan Hartley

Euan Murray

Jurandre Kruger

Ignacio Fernandez Lobbe

Scott Gray

Mark Easter

Roger Wilson

Lee Dickson

Stephen Myler

Sean Lamont

James Downey

Bruce Reihana

Paul Diggin

Ben Foden

Each of these players made 18 or more appearances in the starting line up. A surprise for me when I did this was that Sean had started so many (18) games. I was also a little surprised that Chris Ashton made 17 starts although once Bruce moved to the wing and settled in that position his game opportunities became more limited. Chris only started 8 games where Paul Diggin started and three of those were at full back.

What is however obvious is that the "A" team was pretty settled in most positions with the number 13 shirt being the most obvious candidate where this was not the case. Jon Clarke and Joe Ansbro were the main holders of the shirt although Chris Mayor also played a part.

Votes

Over the season there were a grand total of 3495 votes. My thanks to you all!

The lowest vote of the season came away at Bristol in the league when there were only 40 votes. The lowest home vote was 75 for the only home defeat of the season against Newcastle.

The highest number of votes was 173 for both home and away games. The home match was against Leicester - perhaps no surprise there - and the away match, the ECC final against Bourgoin at the Stoop.

We had 18 home matches and 17 away matches and the average vote was 121 for the home games and 77 for the away games.

It would be nice to try and bump up the home votes next season if we can.

Winners

Now as published last week the winner of the MoTM for the season was Paul Diggin with six and a half wins. I thought it might be interesting to see ifon the raw number of votes players received over the season there might be a change.

To remind you here is how the season finished.

FinalWinnersTable

On this basis there was no change in the top three with Paul Diggin getting 437 votes, Roger Wilson 360 votes and Stephen Myler 266votes. After this there was a slight divergence with Ben Foden coming fourth with 236 votes, Soane fifth with 211votes and Neil Best sixth with 200 votes. Below is a graphic with the top 15players for comparison.

TotalVotesTable

This measure is skewed however as those players playing more games have extra opportunities to get votes so the next measure I looked at was votes per game. Here I took the total votes and simply divided by the number of time a player had appeared on the list. This is perhaps the best indication of the average quality that the player showed.

VotesPerMatchTable

Here, again, there was no change at the very top with Paul Diggin again coming top with an average 19 votes per game he started. Roger Wilson was second with 14.4 votes per game with Neil Best third on 12.5 votes per game.

A few interesting things come to light here. The talent that was Rob Milligan shines with his 11^th place on this measure. Brett Sharman who is still very much work in progress came a very creditable 12^th. The talent that is the mercurial Carlos Spencer (who made 8 starts) was in 15^thposition in his last season with the Saints.

Finally Courtney Lawes who was eased into the side during the two cup competitions was in fourth place ahead of Ben Foden. Courtney has a huge future in the game and Ihope he spends his club career with us at the Gardens.

Thanks

Thank you for listening to my ramblings - all feedback and any subsidiary question you have I will try and answer them.

RawPlayerMatches

Man Of the Match - The season review!

Posted by: ComeOnYouSaints.com (IP Logged)

Date: 05/08/2009 19:10

What do you think? You can have your say by posting below.
If you do not already have an account Click here to Register.