The alternative Premier League Team of the Year

It’s that time of year again, dear friends. The PFA have announced their Team of the Year, and so it falls to us to take our metaphorical red pen, crease our metaphorical brow and put them straight. Because once again, the PFA have insisted on picking the best, or at least pretty close to the best, team available.

(Previous XIs can be found here, here and here.)

Because losing your place in the team because you were having a cheeky tab in the showers is quite the most wonderfully teenage way to lose your place in the team. Nobody understands poor Szczęsny. Nobody at all. And he didn’t ask to be born.

In a world where fullbacks are so often prized for their explosiveness, Azpilicueta is precisely the opposite. He’s a bomb disposal expert: He’s the calm guy with the pair of pliers who looks at the situation, purses his lips, then leans over and — as everybody else in the room holds their breath, closes their eyes and makes their peace with themselves — calmly snips the red wire, before ambling off whistling. OK? No, right, the attackers are the bomb, and the wire is ... like, the crucial pass, and the pliers are ... the interception? Does that work?

Look, forget that. Talk to the experts. Talk to Gary Neville. This is the man who, we can be fairly sure, has spent more time working on being a fullback than anyone else alive. A man once mocked by a teammate for “practicing long throws, Gary Neville’s idea of fun.” If there’s such a thing a Fullbacking For Dummies, then not only has Neville read the thing backwards, forwards and upsidedown, but he’s neatly annotated it and then written a 12,000 word email to raise “just a few quick questions”. And he said Azpilicueta’s defending is “immaculate”. Take it from the best. Sorry about that bomb thing.

Does the proper Team of the Year give out an armband? Or has John Terry had to make one for himself? Either way, our captain, leader and legend is Dejan Lovren, the most expensive defender Liverpool have ever purchased. He began the season as the man who would compensate for the loss of Luis Suarez at one end by reinforcing things at the other; he ended it sitting on the bench, watching a 21-year-old midfielder have a mildly diverting, occasionally disastrous shot at being a defender. Some arc.

We thought we ought to have somebody to represent the joyless void that has been Your Twenty Fourteen Slash Fifteen Queens Park Rangers, and poor Ferdinand was the obvious choice. Rather like Lovren, his arrival was greeted with a certain amount of parping fanfare; like Lovren, he soon found himself sidelined as it emerged that his purchase wasn’t quite the triumph it had appeared. Of course, we should have known it was all going wrong the moment Ferdinand’s arrival prompted Harry Redknapp, the most 4-4-2 man of all time, to start mucking about with three at the back. Like skydiving, competitive chili eating and gabba, if you’re not into some things by a certain age, they should probably just be left.

* There is the possibility that he’s just terrified of Nigel Pearson. And that would be fair enough.

Something strange happened in the middle of the season. An English footballer, playing for a team in the bottom half of the table, spurned the possibility of leaving for somewhere slightly bigger, preferring to stay at a club they liked instead of spending their future crashing out of the Europa League. And yet that same footballer got into the England team anyway.

Footballers who don’t really look like footballers are a vanishing breed. As the game tends ever more towards the ideal form of the well-toned, well-muscled, well-groomed athlete, ultra-trim androids with interchangeable haircuts, those who don’t quite fit this mould become ever more precious. One such is Santi Cazorla, whose short stature and cherubic face combine to make him look, next to the sexless automatons with whom he is forced to compete, almost perfectly spherical.

Are young players being overworked? Or are they lazy shirkers? Should Sterling get his head down and stay at Liverpool? Or does have every right to jump wherever his career takes him? Is shaming young footballers for being caught sucking gas out of a balloon a staggering piece of tabloid mendacity? Or should young footballers set a better example, lest some impressionable young kid attempt to emulate his idols and accidentally inhale his own face?

Being a footballer’s one thing. But Sterling has become English football’s Maguffin, the object around which the turbulent arguments of the national game rage. He gave up doing the business for the team, and started doing the business for Narrative. A national hero. Pay him whatever he wants.

OK, so he’s been injured, and yes, City have been profoundly disappointing in lots of ways, but still. He’s the best. If you needed one striker to take one shot to save your life, you’d probably spend a fair amount of time wondering what kind of situation had built up to that point. Is this a legal mechanism? And if so, what kind of nonsensical judicial system relies upon footballers to establish guilt and innocence, punishment and reprieve? Does Aguero know that so much is riding on his shot? What’s the setup? Is it a penalty? A free kick? A NASL-style charge from the halfway line? Is there a goalkeeper? And who is the goalkeeper? Is the goalkeeper appointed by the state? Does the goalkeeper know that saving Aguero’s next shot could take a life; that is he is, in effect, an executioner? Does he wear a black mask? Is there some kind of support system in place for Aguero and/or the goalkeeper, and the guilt they might have to bear? Or, alternatively, perhaps you’re guilty. Perhaps you did it, you bastard. And Aguero has to go out there knowing that if he fails then justice will go undone and the surviving family members will never have closure. The goalkeeper, the poor goalkeeper trembling inside his black executioner’s mask, knowing that it’s not just his personal and professional pride on the line; knowing that if he dives the wrong way you will be released into an unready world to kill again.

But once you’d sorted all that, and put your affairs in order, you’d totally take Aguero. Every time.