Player Of The Month: March 2010
We began the month of March with a 2-2 draw at Almeria and ended with another 2-2 draw at Arsenal, in between we had five straight wins against Valencia, Stuttgart, Zaragoza, Osasuna and Mallorca. There were some excellent performances but also some below par ones, the first half against Valencia and the first half against Osasuna were particularly poor. However, we ended the month unbeaten and the important thing going into the final stretch of the season is that we are still in with a very good chance for both La Liga and the Champions League.
There was not much doubt about who would win the Player of the Month this time: Leo Messi began the month is outstanding form, adapting perfectly to the 4-2-3-1 system we have seen employed, and scoring an incredible ten goals in the first four games including the works of art against Valencia, Stuttgart and Zaragoza. Messi’s performance against Zaragoza where he scored a hat trick and won a penalty earned him the first ten-out-of-ten rating of the season on this blog.
Second place this month goes to Victor Valdés who has made a number of excellent saves this month and has kept four clean sheets in seven games. Valdés is having a superb season and this is reflected in the fact that he has now made the top five in the Player of the Month award in five of the seven months so far. While Iker Casillas has made more mistakes this season than Valdés it seems incredible that Vicente Del Bosque has not yet called up Valdés for the Spanish team. It will be a great injustice if he is left out of the world cup squad.
The final three places were very tough to call this month, there are several players who performed admirably in some games but who let themselves down in others, and other players who played well but who did not play many minutes. Finally, I decided on third place for Gabi Milito who deserves a medal for coming back so strongly after it had seemed for so long that he would never recover from his injury. Gerard Piqué is fourth, despite only appearing in four games he was very consistant and played an excellent game at the Emirates on Wednesday. Fifth place goes to Pedro who despite not shining was consistant throughout the month and has now truly deserved to be considered a starter in most games.
There were arguments to include Ibrahimovic who scored five goals but he let himself down with the red card at Almeria and all those misses against Zaragoza, while Puyol, Toure and Busquets all had some very strong games but were not so good in others which brought down their averages. Xavi was great against Arsenal but his injury meant he played less than 50% of the minutes this month and so he misses out this time. Finally, a mention should go to Bojan Krkic who has had a disappointing season, but this month he got us a couple of goals while playing for a total of less than 70 minutes. Hopefully he can take confidence from this and start pushing for more opportunities.
To recap: this month’s top five are as follows:
- Leo Messi
- Victor Valdés
- Gabi Milito
- Gerard Piqué
- Pedro Rodriguez
