SMBU Player of the Season

Various Artists

In a season such as this, just who stands out as the player above all others? Before you make that decision, why not consult SMBU's finest minds, as they bid to convince you just who is the Wycombe Wanderers Player of the Season 2007-08.

MARTIN BULLOCK
oily sailor

Martin Bullock is Wycombe’s player of the season because he embodies a new era of harmony at the club, a new era of professionalism. Let’s rewind a year and focus on a former bald captain of the Wanderers moving to M6 glamour side Walsall and firing off abusive shots at Paul Lambert, claiming that none of the new signings or potential targets “excited” him.

Let’s fast forward back to the present and see that the newly-constructed Wycombe team has achieved a joint-record Football League points total of 78 and has comfortably qualified for the playoffs. Let’s hear it for a team of Martin Bullocks.

Of course, Martin won’t remember the season from an individual point of view with any great joy. He struggled to nail down a place in the team once the pitches got rougher and stickier than a prostitute’s cushion. Bullock ended the season by announcing his retirement and there’s absolutely no chance of him popping up as a playoff hero. But at his previous clubs he always relished tearing across the wide Adams Park meadow like a wolfish pup and his last action as a pro was to walk off at that same ground, on the day Wycombe defeated Darlington in March.

His departure will be largely uncharted, there are rumours he is buying a farm abroad like someone on Channel 4, but Bullock represents that yeoman class of footballer who plug away in the lower leagues, occasionally hitting the headlines in the way that small earthquakes in East Anglia do. He was a decent player, who had decent games and had a decent reputation. Let’s do the decent thing and raise our hats to him as he surges out of Buckinghamshire in a decently-sized car.

SCOTT McGLEISH
Tory Goon

“Yeah but she’s got a great personality.” You know that you’re looking at a dead horse when you have to resort to that line and some of my colleagues’ recommendations for SMBU’s award of Player of the Season are no different.

Yes Sergio may have Argentinian flair, long flowing locks and (by all accounts) be a genuinely nice bloke. Sure the Doc may have a beard any player should be proud of and the fiery temperament to go with it. However, these are not reasons to vote either of them for Player of the Season. Similar things could be said of many other players in our squad. All as utterly irrelevant as Ken Livingstone at City Hall.

Football is about goals. “It’s a bit obvious,” I hear you cry, but without goals would Wycombe have achieved 78 points this season and sailed into the play-offs? Scott McGleish’s tally of 26 goals (and counting) this year is quite simply second to none at the club, while he only narrowly missed out on the League Two Golden Boot competition itself. The rest of the team together only managed 30, including our new signings and fellow strikers John Sutton (6) and Leon Knight (5). The highlight of course was the four goal ‘hat trick’ at Field Mill in January and the subsequent refusal of some media organisations to credit the second goal to McGleish.

It’s not just about goals of course, though I do rate them rather highly. So let’s look at some other stats. McGleish has played in every single league game this season, with forty-five starts and one substitute appearance. No other player this season can make the same claim. His disciplinary record is also excellent with a mere two yellow cards picked up this season.

The stats don’t lie, Ladies and Gentlemen. If Wycombe prove their critics wrong and achieve promotion later this month then it will have been down to the only possible choice for Player of the Season, Scott McGleish.

DAVID McCRACKEN
Ron Waller

It takes some proper balls to turn up a football club looking almost exactly like Prentice from the 1996 BBC adaptation of Iain Banks’ The Crow Road, but David McCracken has done that. And then some. A centre half wearing the number seven shirt needs to be tricky, nippy, 5ft tall and spend most of his time jinking down the right wing but its testimony to McCracken that he is none of these things. And then some.

David McCracken is the club’s player of the season because he has done what needed to be done. His critics have been repetitive and poorly dressed. “His distribution is poor” they howl. “He just lumps it long” they weep. Of course he does. He has to. We’ve done culture, we’ve done passing to feet across the back line. We’ve done shimmies, and dummies, and one-twos across our own six yard box. We’ve also done failure and disappointment and heartache. Every time McCracken smashes another monstrous bargain clearance into the faces of hapless Family Stand residents, he is clearing the cobwebs. The dead-wood. The bodies in the attic. The dead brasses from the lorry’s cabin. This isn’t Newsnight Review; this is the hunt for promotion from League 2.

He’s cool as well – North of The Border cool. Gerard Love’s cooler younger brother cool. Some deranged Wycombe fans have nicknamed him the Crack Pipe, and not surprisingly sodium bicarbonate sales have gone through the roof in leafy Bucks. A rock at the back, and rocks at the back of the terrace. At set pieces, fans scream “Hit the Pipe” or “Get on the Crack” and there’s no better example than home to Rotherham. David McCracken scored the most important goal of the season. End of discussion. He is also the most vital cog in Paul Lambert’s Football Machine.

Every half-won header, every enormous wallop into touch, every last ditch clattering, every captain’s point and shout McCracken has dished out has stumbled us towards the play-offs. If his feet could speak, they’d mumble “Get tae fucckk”. Those mumbling feet are the most articulate commentary on this entire season, and on this beautiful club, so simply accept it, embrace it, and recognise it and most of all vote David McCracken as Wycombe Wanderers Player of the Season.

LEON KNIGHT
William Poths

Leon Knight is unquestionably Wycombe Wanderers’ Player of the Season.

In January Paul Lambert swooped for "pint sized" (well done Dave Peters) Leon Knight, he may well resemble that short kid at school who would start a fight for no reason and then despite held away at arms length would still punch and kick air furiously. In many ways his play resembles that, Wycombe fans will remember this well when he and Delroy Facey tore the Chairboys apart in a 4-2 romp in 2002 for Huddersfield. Knight scored a brace one of which was celebrated running past the braying hordes in the Valley complete with finger on pursed lips, you can still feel the hatred generated to this day.

Take the hatred that he inflicted on the Wycombe fans that night in March 2002 and feel it running through every single opposing fan, every single game he plays. In a famous homosexual story line in Grange Hill in the early nineties one of the Grange Hill teachers was being provoked by rival school St. Joe’s students, one of the Grange Hill kids grabbed one of the St. Joe’s pupils and said "he may be a poof, but he’s our poof, so leave him alone, understand?" the same is very much true of Leon Knight, only replace "poof" with "irritating striker you’d like to punch in the face".

It’s that feeling coupled with an uncanny goal scoring ability combined with technique that is unique at this level. His goal of the century overhead kick versus Darlington epitomising his talent, seemingly will not win Wycombe’s goal of the season contest being beaten instead by some volley or other at a plastic football stadium witnessed live by zero true football fans.

Leon Knight alone stood up to the Franchise seeking a transfer away from the north Bucks black hole, insisting on a move to his most local football league club. How often do you see that in football today? He wants to be refreshed before games, make training every day without the long drives. It’s all about performance for Knight and it has told in his play, he has managed to get on the score sheet in 5 of his 12 starts producing a very respectable 0.4 strike rate.

On his home debut his tenacity and desire to win (usually mistaken by the drones as "passion") was on full display as he hurried and hassled Rochdale defenders being introduced with half an hour to go trying to break the deadlock, eventually finding his way it the referee’s notebook.

A vote for Knight is local, it’s a desire to win, it’s tenacity, it’s you’d rather have him with you than against you, it’s opposition hatred, it’s a goal scoring record second only to an ex-scummer. Knight has to be player of the season and if he scores the winner at Cuckoo Farm next season he’d best be in the Queen’s birthday honours list too.

TOM WILLIAMS
Vladimir Nabokov

First, let’s be clear. I’d like the player of the season to be Lewis Christon. But we all know he can’t be. It’s crystal clear to anyone watching Wycombe Wanderers this season that THE player of our season is Tom Williams.

Williams was signed at the back-end of July much to Paul “Lambert” Lambert’s pleasure. He was “absolutely delighted at signing him”. “We’ve been trying to get him all summer, and there’s been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. He’s a terrific player who’s played lots of games at a higher level.” Williams was let go to Peterborough on New Year’s Eve, amidst a volley of abuse.

Admittedly there was a bit of a false start. He was presumably a bit lacking in fitness, having missed most of pre-season, neither he nor Craig Woodman, were playing, with Lambert Lambert preferring to play two right-backs instead.

But when he did get his chance, many fans were quietly impressed. He didn’t shirk a tackle and, when it came to defending, he seemed to want to get stuck in. Moreover, he apparently saw it as his absolute duty to skin the opposition full-back at least nine times a match and to have some kind of compulsion about going round the outside to get to the bye line. In this Wycombe team, where all wingers seemed to live in fear of the getting too far forward and incline to the inside like suburban agoraphobics, it was a bit of a revelation. And to cap it all, when he got the chance to cross, he did. He whipped the ball in with pace and direction - moving or dead ball, it appeared to make no difference, in it came, with meaning. There were a couple of performances in particular with Sergio in front of him in left midfield which showed promise of a genuine partnership.

But then came the Swindon FA cup calamity – a crass error on the corner of the six-yard box that let in the ever-irritating Christian Roberts to score the first goal. Unquestionably the moment which determined our Cup fate for the season. But hey, these things happen, don’t they? Er … no. Not in Lambert Lambert’s team they don’t. Who knows what was said in the dressing room? In public Lambert Lambert turned on his recent purchase in unusual fashion. Unable even to name him, he spat, “the mistake for the goal was just a terrible mistake.”

Williams didn’t take to scapegoating so well. After being omitted from the side, a late November deal to return to Posh fell through. He was back and Lambert Lambert was making positive noises. Then there was the story of Williams relishing the 6-0 thrashing at Stockport and that was that.

He was off to Peterborough at the year’s end. To add insult to injury, he barely played for Posh. Suggesting that maybe Darren Ferguson was more intent, Kenny Dalglish style, on depriving Wanderers fans any chance of ever seeing a player visit the bye line again than he was on improving his own team.

So am I asking you to forgive him his inability to simply kick the ball out for a corner v. Swindon? To forgive his moodiness? Or to forgive him his tasteless wife? No – not a bit. Just give in to the force of the argument.

Tom Williams just is the player of this season because he epitomises what Wycombe Wanderers have become in 07/08: we spend money we can’t afford on sizeable wages to get a player of quality from a higher division (while we keep another for spare); then give up on him immediately he makes a mistake or has a tantrum; and immediately look to the next quality player – in this case (ahem) Leon Knight.

No hint of patience. No desire to add value by sticking with players as they improve. No sense even of getting value for our investment.

Just buy it and promptly throw it away, disregarding the debt. Vote Williams: player of the season for the credit crunch club.

SERGIO TORRES
Stevedore from Tyneside

If Scott McGleish had scored more goals this season than Mark West and Tony Horseman did in their combined Wycombe careers, Sergio Torres would still have deserved the player of the season award. 26, 49, 234, 587 -hut, hut - it doesn't matter.

Yeah, yeah, he has good hair. Yeah, yeah, he was friendlier to me in Verl than any of the friends I was actually with. Yeah, yeah, whenever he speaks Spanish within ear shot it makes my knees tremble. Yeah, yeah, his shampoo bottle displays in Boots made La Sagrada Familia look like Layer Road. But this is all immaterial. Sergio Torres has style and originality. I don't want to use the term 'flair', but I will. Flair - he's got flair. Panache even. He's chic.

"He gives the ball away too much", the critics rage. Let him. If he gives the ball away, it just leaves me in a heightened state of anticipation, waiting excitedly for him to get it back. "He's a luxury player", the braying mob cries. Well, if when you buy soap it feels like a treat then you might think like that, yeah. "But where's the passion?", the reprobates squeal. It seeps from his every pore - he loves the club, the opportunity it’s given him and he's signed a new contract.

Play revolves around him, and so should the world. He'll get the club promoted this month.

MIKE WILLIAMSON
Eric Plant

It’s sad when footballers suffer serious injuries. Especially at our level. Your average “League 2” [sic] footballer probably hasn’t got enough to retire on if his career’s cut short prematurely, no book deal wrapped up, no guarantee of future employment watching a monitor alongside Jeff Stelling and Paul Walsh.
Mike Williamson went from February 2007 to February 2008 without playing a single game of first team football. In the meantime we’d signed a world record breaking 17 centre halves. It couldn’t have been easy. A lesser man may have crumbled, allowed doubts to creep in. Not Michael.

Fortunately, like most of us, I’ve never suffered such an injury but from what I can gather, the recovery from a cruciate ligament injury is a long, lonely and painful journey. It is one that Mike Williamson has made with success. Coming back to play any part at all is impressive enough. That he has come back and been as good, actually scrap that, better than ever, and so quickly is nothing short of sensational. He is an inspirational figure, and a worthy captain. It’s not as though the man he has replaced, Dave McCracken is not a good player. Quite the opposite. But it’s a measure of Mike Williamson’s form since returning that I have not heard one dissenting voice, one solitary fan question his place in the side.

Sure, Scott McGleish has been brilliant this year, he’s scored a lot of goals, Frank Fielding’s been superb between the sticks, and Sergio has lit up Adams Park with his Argentinian wizardry. But this work was all done in the public eye, in front of an adoring crowd. They were rightly able to claim their plaudits there and then. Whilst they were scoring goals, claiming crosses or beating defenders where was Mike Williamson? On his own, in a gym, sweating blood so that one day he might be able to join them. He didn’t have thousands cheering him on. He didn’t have a bottle of champagne waiting for him in the changing room. There was nobody there chanting his name.

This is our chance to recognise that there is more to a season than simply what happens for 90 minutes on a pitch once or twice a week. In coming back from such a nasty injury to captain the side means that Mike Williamson is mentioned in the same breath as Keith Ryan. From this particular scribe, praise comes no higher.

Congratulations Mike – you’re an absolute credit to yourself and to our football club. Let’s hope this story ends with you lifting the play off trophy at Wembley in a few weeks time. You deserve it.

06.05.2008. 18:29

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