MATCH RATINGS RESULTS - SEASON REVIEW
Monday 9th June 2008
by Ron Norris

All season long you have been rating the players’ performances by marking each of them with a score between 1 and 10. We've told you the averages on a game by game basis but how did things shape up over the whole campaign?

Here we take a look at the averages from the season and see how you judged the teams efforts overall. We've ruled out anyone who started less than five games as that doesn't produce a fair score so that leaves us with twenty six players, three managers and a clutch of referees and opposition performances to look back on.

Every year when we review these overall results they always seem a tad harsh, that said however there has been plenty of reasons to kick the team this season and some of the early performances deserved the rank bad marks they received!

As a result, and for the second season running, we only have one player who strayed into the 7’s as an average score and he was helped in that by only playing in six games! Yep, Martin Cranie is your highest scoring player of the season with an average mark of 7.29

Last year Lee Camp was top of the pile, and he’s right up there again this time around, coming in second with a devilish average score of 6.66.  Rowan Vine was just a tenth of a point behind in third whilst Damien Delaney and Akos Buzsaky rounded out the rest of the top five. Interestingly, player of the season Martin Rowlands, was only rated into seventh place overall.

At the other end of the table it’s no surprise to see Stefan Moore back amongst the dead men. After finishing bottom in 05/06 he was beaten to the wooden spoon by Zesh Rehman last year but has proudly limped his way back in 2008 with a quite woeful average of 4.51

The highest individual game rating for a player was scored by Martin Rowlands, he earned a staggeringly high mark of 8.88 for his performance during the 4-2 away win at Watford. Meanwhile Rehman scored the worst individual score for the second season running for, you guessed it, the away game at West Brom. His efforts in that game averaged out at 2.5 out of ten!

This year we have three managers' scores to compare and it’s actually Mick Harford who comes out best, although only just.

Rangers’ caretaker boss in 2007, Harford took charge of five games and achieved an average of 6.24 across them all. His best rated performance was his last in charge, the 1-0 victory at Charlton, whilst his worst was his first - the 4-2 defeat at Colchester.

Luigi De Canio was just behind Harford, scoring an average of 6.23 from his thirty five games. His best (8.25) was for the 3-0 home win over Stoke whilst his worst (3.90) was the 2-1 home defeat against Crystal Palace.

It seems like years since John Gregory was our manager but it is only a matter of months since he departed after taking charge of eight games this season. From those he earned an average score of 4.50, starting well with a 7.01 in the first game of the season, a 2-2 draw against Bristol City, and getting progressively worse and worse until his final match in charge, at West Brom, yielded a mark of just 2.52. Mind you that’s better than poor old Zesh managed in that game and Gregory is the one who played him at bloody right back!

The match officials received their usual wild and varied ratings, from the highest (Mike Dean’s 7.27 for the Chelsea game) to the lowest (Clive Oliver’s 2.75 for the away game at Wolves) they averaged 5.44 over all the games. Mind you that’s better than a lot of our players!

Finally you also rated the opposition for each game and you give the whole of The Championship a fairly average average of 5.92. The best performance by an opposition side according to the marks was West Brom for their 5-1 destruction of us and the worst was for Norwich’s efforts in their 1-0 defeat at Loftus Road just two games later.

So that’s all wrapped up for another season. Hopefully the coming campaign will see just one manager and plenty of players, or least two, breaking the magic seven mark!

The match ratings votes will return in the new season, thanks for taking part over the last ten months, here are the full average ratings.