Ballon d’Bluebird

By: Martyn | May 26th, 2009

Ahhh, awards ceremonies. The much-utilized way of expressing gratitude when a slap on one’s tush and a “Good job, sport” from the man too posh for idle water-fountain chit-chat and polystyrene cups of Maxwell House just will not suffice. I immediately hasten to add that this isn’t the bitter lampoonery of an under-appreciated lackey longing to pull a folded scrap of A4 from his breast pocket adorned by the names of second aunties, my Armenian Tondrakian priest and childhood pets. No, I used to quite enjoy the end-of-season presentation nights at the local rugby club with my football team throughout primary and secondary school age.

From the bashful pre-pubescent Martyn who combined fetching the crummy plastic trophy post-generic compliment from Alan the manager with saying something wacky down the microphone to the amusement of my Adidas Popper-clad Panda Pop-swigging pals, through to trudging/snatching/rejecting matriarchal praise until she stopped saying I wasn’t old enough to have more than 2 pints. For Christ’s sake woman, I’m 14 with a thicker ‘tache than Dad’s and street cred to maintain!! You may find all this wistful nostalgia more akin to Kerim Bey on the train in From Russia With Love, rather than it serving an insightful purpose: but I have digressed for a reason. Award ceremonies can go beyond metaphorically smooching the rounded portions of the anatomy located on the posterior of the pelvic region, as epitomized by the social importance of the aforementioned ones I would attend every May. Nevertheless certain award ceremonies are specifically designed to mean more than just a knees-up and a night off for the wife, and offer a necessary acknowledgment of the valiant and heroic efforts of a particular individual. Sometimes however, these can veer into the former description too heavily and dilute what is supposed to be an occasion upon which deserving qualities are saluted and rewarded.

According to the official website of The Professional Footballers Association, the PFA Player of the Year Award ceremony is ‘the biggest occasion in the football calendar’. Heaven forbid that any match in the sport the body serves is granted that grandiose title. Nope, an evening spent lavishing an obscenely large dumbbell-(grot)esque trophy to young men with awkward body language, teeth whiter than iPod headphones and decadent suits is what soccer is all about. Having Googled ‘What makes a MVP?’ to determine what Joe Bloggs believes is required to be deemed worthy of such an acronym, I discovered that opinions range from cheerleaders of cogs in the machine to the idolisers of ice-cool insular individuals. Someone who asked the very same question as I on Yahoo Answers was greeted with responses replying in support of the team player (“unselfish, winning games, showing leadership, and being willing to pass to ball, and showing confidence in your teammates. Definitely not individual stats…“), to the superstar show-boat suckers (“when i think of an mvp i think of what the players team would be like without him/her so if the team would suffer a lot then the player is an mvp”).

Now seeing as Cristiano Ronaldo has won the PFA Players’ Player of the Year award in two of the last three seasons, the questionable decision to award it to Johnny Vegas’s cleaner (Ryan Giggs) this time out suggests that the likes of Mr Diop, Mr Diouf and Mr Zuberbühler are as uncertain as the rest of us as to how exactly one judges the MVP. If merely that renders the award on football’s *biggest occasion* somewhat unreliable, I’m yet to even penetrate the ludicrous fact that the ballot is taken just over halfway through the season with the award then presented six weeks prior to the conclusion of the relevant campaign!! Many have argued that Giggs – who has made just 13 starts in a 38 game season – was presented with the prize as a token gesture because he’d failed to win it during his long and much-decorated career. But surely the worthy winner should have played consistenly from Rounds 1 – 38 (or the twenty-something games that coincided with the players hitting the polling booths)? Gordon Taylor posited: “I can’t think of any footballer in the country who would deny him [the PFA] trophy in his cabinet.” To certify the veracity of that statement, I imagine the namesake of an anthropomorphic train vigorously canvassed and memorised the opinion of all reserve League Two players before speaking on behalf of every El Hadji, Papa Bouba and Pascal from the Prostar to the DW Stadium.

Nevertheless, be that unanimous accordance true or not, this supposed compliment wasn’t exactly propped up by its equally yesteryear-serving partner: “The only surprise about Ryan Giggs being named PFA Players’ Player of the Year in April 2009 was that it had taken so long for him to win the prestigious award.” Even the chairman of the panel who bestowed the hideous lump of Ravanelli-silver upon the garden furniture tormenter seemed either reluctant or suffering from a praise-paucity relevant to a season in which Manchester United have won the league relatively Giggs-devoid. Still, maybe head honcho Taylor was better off in not trying to conjure superficial, superfluous or exaggerated praise and hyperbole for the hairy one. One of the primary reasons for the Welsh Wizard’s triumph offered by a prominent Welsh sports journalist was this gem: ‘Ask the Derby players who were twice victims of United’s march to Wembley thanks to the dictatorial way he orchestrated victories in the Carling Cup and the FA Cup.’ Yes, that would be those trifled third and second-rate cup competitions played against a team who struggled for 46 games to stay in the second tier of English football. Not exactly Ballon D’or-netting stuff, is it?

I like Ryan Giggs. I reckon he’s one of those players who says sugar instead of sit with an inserted ‘h’ and is so polite that he feigns amyxia in order to avoid joining the spit-spraying antics of his fellow Red Devils. Yet Giggs winning the award ‘that most matters because it comes from your peers’ in 2008/09 showed such decisions are the product of an erroneous process built on misguided guilt, spurious reasoning and a sense of direction worse than Frank Spencer’s. But then why the Dickens should an unworthy candidate such as Wayne ‘Graham Rooney’ Rooney, Steven Gerrard, Danny Murphy or Nemanja ‘Wentworth Miller’ Vidic have won it? After all, none of that quadruple has excelled against the Rams. TWICE.

Ultimately, I’m concluding that a prize for exceptional individual endeavor is a part of the game that’s relevant, and as such, should reflect the efforts on the pitch of an outstanding individual from August-May. With my forthright belief in this idea and the aforementioned contentiousness in mind (and still blocking out the painful memory of our cowardly flock of Bluebirds(/tits) migrating North in spring), the criterion for my Ballon d’Bluebird is thus:
- Player must have featured in the majority of our games from the off.
- Player must have contributed in an anti-anonymous sense to the outcome of many/crucial games as well as the course of the 08/09 season.
- Player must have been a men amongst the boys or provided a spark during a poor performance or sequence of games that then re-kickstarted our season.
- Player must not be given award as a present of gratitude for a great campaign five years ago (5 of my top 6 were new 08/09 arrivals).

Winner: ROSS McCORMACK
First things first, that quiff is hilarious. It just screams to me of the type of middle-class schoolkid who’d base his school dinner choice on whatever the Chief Chav was having; an all-round sheep as opposed to the sheepdog. Digs aside (and I’m entitled to one seeing as he went as Andy McNab as the others during our enactment of Jenga), Super Ross deservedly glides in to spot un after 2757 action-packed minutes of second-tier English football. Having featured in 38 of our Football League fixtures this season, the player who shares an agent with Scott Sinclair, Leroy Lita and NK Croatia Sesvete starlet Semir Slomic has managed an impressive 1 goal every 131 minutes. If we’re judging Ross’s contribution to this team on goals, then phwoar phwoar phwoar: there’ve been a few corkers. For example, away at Palace, McCormack scored one of the goals of the season as he single-handedly drove us to victory, and at home to Blackpool a 25-yard free-kick sealed a 2-0 win. Although a large number of Ross’s twenty-plus goal haul were penalty kicks, it was the manner of which the player who dreams of playing Manchester City converted these – many under pressure in the dying embers of stoppage time fire – that increased his hero status to us fans. In a post analysing the bargain we’d got ourselves, I gushed (like a 13 year old schoolgirl after hearing Mark Owen utter my name and ask what I’d like signed in that camp Mancunian accent of his during a circa-1996 HMV signing session on the back of Take That’s boom): ‘Anyone who has seen McCormack play will tell you that he has all the characteristics and qualities needed to not only survive but thrive in England’s highest tier: Pace in abundance, urgency throughout, tactical awareness, defence from the front, tirelessness, an eye for goal, stamina, FK and perfect PK taking abilities, positional sense and a powerful and accurate strike.’ From a late equalizer against his former club on an enjoyable day out at the Keepmoat Stadium in August, through to his scum-silencing leveller at Ninian Park on a sunny April morning, Droopy Drawers is well worthy of the 2008/09 Ballon d’Bluebird.