Really?
If you thought Liverpool’s season was depressing, you don’t even know the half of it.
Simon Mignolet (Simon Mignolet) has turned into somewhat of a cult hit at Anfield with the Liverpool Echo suggesting that he is the club’s player of the season.
Presumably because, in the last 12 weeks tops, he hasn’t been as atrociously abysmal as he was for the first four or five months of the campaign.
Thank God August to January doesn’t count, right?
There’s a decent ‘keeper in Simon Mignolet somewhere. Somewhere.
Is that guy better than he has shown for Liverpool? Absolutely. Is he a good enough number one to take the club to where they want to be? Absolutely not.
And has his brief emergence to say hello for the 2014/15 campaign been enough to warrant him as the club’s player of the season? Above Coutinho? Skrtel even? Above any of the rest of them? Hilarious.
But the Liverpool Echo are basing most of their justification on his clean sheets tally which is higher than anyone else’s in the league. Does that make him better than De Gea? Courtois? Forster? Does it not credit the team’s set-up? The defenders’ performances in spite of their shaky number one who had fallen so far from grace that he was even replaced by Brad bloody Jones?
“A little over four months ago, the Belgian’s Anfield career was at rock bottom,” the Echo’s analysis reads.
“Now, he is a man transformed. Confident and reliable, he stands alone at the top of the Premier League clean sheets chart.
“Mignolet deserves a shout for the way he has responded to adversity. And while Philippe Coutinho has emerged as the darling of the Kop, and played his way into the PFA Team of the Year in the process, it is the goalkeeper who has been the Reds’ most reliable performer since Christmas.”
January 10:
Liverpool kept a clean sheet that day but it wasn’t exactly a stunning performance from their ‘keeper that saved them. Both Ozil and Sanchez could also thank him for their goals kindly going in recently for Arsenal without so much as a flap from the last line of defence.
“Goalkeepers are often overlooked for individual awards, but Mignolet’s contributions in recent months have been both spectacular and consistent.
“The thing that stands out most about Mignolet’s renaissance has been how complete it has been. Make no mistake, the Belgian’s Liverpool career was in jeopardy at the end of 2014. His kicking had disintegrated to an embarrassing degree, his relationship with his defenders was non-existent, and his penalty-box presence was meek, to say the least. Even his shot-stopping, always his strongest attribute, was suffering.
“But having returned to the side against Burnley on Boxing Day, the transformation has been there for all to see. Mignolet comes for crosses with more authority, he shouts louder, he kicks with greater assurance, and his reflexes and positioning have been outstanding.”
You can vote for your favourite player over on the Echo’s website.
Warning: it doesn’t make for pretty reading.
Liverpool fans have been disillusioned this season after they had promised so much last year and looked for all the world that they might have arrived back where they should be. Back competing.
It hasn’t transpired. But, as another rebuilding job starts in the summer, they can at least take comfort in the knowledge that they already have a spectacular, outstanding, and complete number one to build their rock on.
