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Top 10 SWFC Players of the last 10 years (Owlstalk Ratings)


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On 28/05/2022 at 19:01, I Love Coffee said:

The bottom 5 are likely to be (in alphabetical order):

 

BOYD, George

JONES, David

ODUBAJO, Moses

PALMER, Liam

VAN AKEN, Joost

Palmer ahead of Maghoma? Really?

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38 minutes ago, DuttyTeabags said:

Not sure what the above is, but this is the team (in hindsight) which would have gotten us promoted that day vs Hull.

 

                   WW

Hunt.   Lees.   Loosens.  Pudil

         Lee.   Lopez.   Bannan

  Forest.    Hooper.    Joao

 

Our CM pairing of Lee and Hutch got overran by their three and their full backs (one of them in fairness being Robertson) were given the freedom of the park. We know first hand how erratic and prone to balls over the top Odebejo is so having Lopez spray them to a marauding Joao would have stretched them and meant they didn't suffocate us as much as they did.

 

Westwood was unbeatable until Diame hit that worldie but you could still see Westwood berating himself for not having got a finger to it.

 

(Carlos got out thought that day, in much the same way Moore did away at Sunderland. )

 

Westwood: Incredible keeper, best I've seen at Hillsboro other than Pressman before he started eating pies at halftime.

 

 

He definitely left McGoldrick with a couple of loosens in that Ipswich gamelol

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Guest I Love Coffee
2 minutes ago, Miruic said:

Palmer ahead of Maghoma? Really?

 

Maghoma was a decent player

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13 minutes ago, Emerson Thome said:

Coming soon, number 4 - a Wednesday legend who was voted man of the match most times by Owlstalk in an individual season (12).

My guess is this will be Hutchinson - possibly Carlos season 2 being the season in question.

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Unless something very unusual happens, this will be the first season in ten that Sam Hutchinson won’t play for Sheffield Wednesday. He will be a big loss.

 

The fortune of the team has been closely linked with the appearance of our midfield (and more recently, defensive) talisman. After fighting back from a hole in his cartilage that briefly led to an early retirement at 21, he played every game for Wednesday like it could be his last. Launching into tackles, haring around the pitch and celebrating his (occasional) goals with a barely disguised glee.

 

I’d like to focus in particular in the god-like spell of form he enjoyed in the two playoff campaigns under Carlos. In 15/16, he completed the extremely rare feat of averaging over 7 on Owlstalk for an entire season (only achieved 5 times in total in the past 10 seasons*).

 

The next season, 16/17, was a strange beast, in that we came 4th, and on paper were an even better team – but many of the fans grew disillusioned with the style of play. The Owlstalk ratings for the squad dropped considerably (from a 6.48 average in 15/16 to 6.26 in 16/17) and no-one was rated above 6.63. Except, that is, for Hutchinson who came flying in at 6.95. He was voted man of the match a record 12 times in a season (and in only 34 appearances). This included a run of 7 man-of-the-match appearances in 8 games in December-January (and the only match where he wasn’t man of the match he was voted in second place).

 

He dragged us to the playoffs with a 17-point haul from these 8 tricky games when most of the rest of the team was playing badly. For these two months, he was the best player in the league.

 

Hutchinson's purple patch:

135978618_Screenshot2022-07-12at20_42_31.png.b3dafc806b6a33aa1791e7434c4ca2a6.png

 

*excluding players who only started a handful of games

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In this bonus second post, I thought it was worth dwelling on the impact Hutchinson has had in these past 9 seasons. The table at the bottom shows how much better we play with him in the side than without him. A difference of 0.15 points per game might not sound like a lot, but it is the difference between coming 8th and 14th. All down to one player. Over a massive sample of nearly 200 games in both columns. I doubt there are many other players in Wednesday’s history with such a big impact.

 

To illustrate this, the two seasons we’ve managed to get more than 25 league games in a season out of Sam, Wednesday have finished 4th. The season he played 25 games we came 6th. By contrast, the season injuries restricted him to just 7 starts (17/18), Wednesday dropped from 4th to 15th. The moment Garry Monk dropped Hutchinson from the first XI (the famous post-party Boxing Day game at Stoke), we went into freefall from 4th to 16th in half a season. The season we released him, we were 23rd in the league and almost dead and buried by the time he returned (and he still gave us the lead in the winner-takes-all survival game, but it was not to be).

 

So, it is a shame this most impactful player missed so many games. And I know a lot of people will say he was always injured (204 is a lot of games to miss). But, we can break this down slightly – of the 204 there were 90 where he wasn’t injured - on the subs bench (21), frozen out by Jos or Monk (34), or suspended (13). This also includes the 23 games where he left the club entirely to play in Cyprus.

 

So, I think the figure for injuries is more like 113 games (this isn’t an exact science). This works out at around 13 games missed with injury per season over his eight and a half years. And that includes two large chunks:

 

When he first signed for us in 2014, he was still getting over a debilitating knee injury. Otherwise he would most likely have played more games in the Premier League. But it did mean for 30 or so games in the 2014-15 season he was unavailable.

 

Then there was the 2017-18 season, where he fractured his leg, it was misdiagnosed by the Wednesday medical team, he was rushed back into the team and this made the injury worse, then he was rushed back again, and suffered a hernia injury. He missed nearly a whole season. It would be harsh to blame Hutchinson for this – he certainly wasn’t the only player to miss large chunks of football around that time – Kieran Lee, Gary Hooper and Almen Abdi (if he exists) had similar issues.

 

After that his fitness record has improved. Since August 2018, he has only actually missed around 25 games with injury (around 6 per season). Yes, this includes times he was frozen out so couldn't get injured. You could blame Hutchinson for that, but I think bad man management by Jos/Monk was more to blame.

 

Anyway, looking at the impact over the last 9 seasons, we will have a massive hole in the team to fill:

 

1838907734_Screenshot2022-07-12at20_42_12.png.16da2cebc060d0cc5957350a26a969b9.png

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Right, so we've reached the final 3, a recap of the players so far:

 

11. Tom Lees

10. Barry Bannan

9. Lee Gregory

8. Kieran Lee

7. Fernando Forestieri

6. Lewis McGugan

5. Keiren Westwood

4. Sam Hutchinson

3. ?

2. ?

1. ?

 

A clue - the final 3 players in the list never played in the same team as each other.

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7 hours ago, Emerson Thome said:

Right, so we've reached the final 3, a recap of the players so far:

 

11. Tom Lees

10. Barry Bannan

9. Lee Gregory

8. Kieran Lee

7. Fernando Forestieri

6. Lewis McGugan

5. Keiren Westwood

4. Sam Hutchinson

3. ?

2. ?

1. ?

 

A clue - the final 3 players in the list never played in the same team as each other.

So my guesses for the top 3.

 

A random one- Venacio

Lopez

Gregory

 

 

 

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Not sure Venancio or Lopez managed 25 appearances..?

 

Hooper, Loovens, Wallace, Fletcher Luongo, Antonio, Kirkland, Hector, Pudil… all haven’t appeared yet. 


On basis of them never playing together I’m going Hooper, Luongo and Antonio

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5 hours ago, FlyingOwl said:

Final three might be all loanees…

 

Venancio

Hector

Lopez

Yep I am calling venacio and hector both in there.

Lopez isn’t on the OP list by looks of it .

 

so hector

venacio

Gregory

 

is my call for last 3

 

 

 

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2 hours ago, mcmigo said:

Yep I am calling venacio and hector both in there.

Lopez isn’t on the OP list by looks of it .

 

Yeah, Lopez only started 19 games, so doesn't qualify.

 

His score for those 19 games (6.36) would put him in 20th, so comfortably top half but not quite right up there at the top.

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