Tottenham’s 2013-14 player of the season – three candidates contesting it

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Spurs finished below where they ended up last year despite high hopes in September, with three players standing out from the others.

A frustrating season at White Hart Lane has come to a close, and despite the reasonable sixth placed finish, and more than reasonable 69 points earned, a sense of dissatisfaction lingers from the campaign.

However, at second glance, finishing just one position and 3 points less than last season isn’t so bad when you sell your talisman, add a whole bunch of players that have never played in England before, and sack two managers.

Below we look at three Spurs players that have outperformed the others this season, with one of them being the club’s best player.

Christian Eriksen

The Dane has been the first of Tottenham’s seven signings to acclimatise to the Premier League, though he didn’t come into some sustained form until the second half of the season. He ended up walking away with several official club awards for best player, but for my money, he just misses out.

Eriksen came fifth in the list of minutes played per assist for Premier League midfielders – some achievement considering he’s the youngest player there and coming from a weaker league.

The former Ajax man has registered an impressive 8 assists and 7 goals, just one strike short of Manchester City’s much more established Spanish international David Silva. He also contributed to more goals than Arsenal’s record signing Mesut Ozil, despite costing a quarter of the German’s transfer fee. Both these players played at least 180 minutes of action more than Eriksen, meaning he could well have caught them up anyway.

Emmanuel Adebayor

One can’t help but wonder if Andre Villas-Boas would still be in the job if he wouldn’t have ditched the Togolese forward at the start of the season. Adebayor of course didn’t make his first start of the season until late December, when the Portuguese was gone and Sherwood was in charge. He scored in that game, and went on to become Tottenham’s new talisman, full of drive and determination to prove his doubters wrong.

Since he returned to action on December 22nd, only four players have scored more goals than Adebayor. Three of these played for the free-scoring Liverpool and Manchester City sides at the top of the league, while Wilfried Bony has played more minutes than his fellow striker. What really stands out for the Spurs man is his conversion rate, with Adebayor having netted more than 1 every 4 attempts.

If Adebayor would have played from the beginning of the season, and exhibited this kind of form, he would have around 28 goals for the campaign – second to only Luis Suarez, and would have been a certainly for Spurs player of the year.

Hugo Lloris (Player of the Year)

The French number one has been the club’s most consistent stand-out player this year, and fans will be hoping one of the French or Spanish giants don’t come calling for him with blank chequebooks. Lloris proved himself to be one of the best goalkeepers in the division with a string of top performances keeping teams out, and at times, scoring down.

From a selection of other top keepers in the division, Lloris features near the top of several categories. He has more punches than any other goalkeeper, and comes in the top 3 in both sweeping up behind his defence and gathering the ball under pressure. What these stats don’t show are the sheer number of goals he prevented that looked destined to find the back of the net once they left the opposition player. Games against Fulham and West Ham in particular stand out. Playing in front of a very poor defence gave the Frenchman lots of practice, and if it wasn’t for his heroics, Tottenham would certainly be much further down the league than they finished.