It’s fun to have a favourite player, but if you don’t think he was poor in the first half of HIS season, then I don’t know what to tell you lol. I’ll take back the one comment about him being crap for half a season if it makes you feel better; I guess he was probably crap for around a third. Nominated for POTM for Feb, Mar, April and May (which we had like 2 games in). Crap for December and January, that’s about a third.
And like you said, he missed the first half. I moreso meant of the games he played, the first h̶a̶l̶f̶ third of this batch he was crap. “IMO”.
As I said, form is TEMPORARY. I didn’t say it wasn’t because he was coming back from injury. But there was a legitimate discussion to be had over dropping Kilkenny for him, given how poorly Lewis was playing. It could well have just been because he was coming back from injury, but that doesn’t change the fact that he was poor.
Lewis is a deep-lying centre mid, who last season played mostly in the quarterback and a No8 type role, roles that necessitate excellent passing, ball carrying, and defensive contributions. His game’s not really about assists or goals. We can look at his stats to see how he got on, when compared to our other more defensive players:
Interceptions: Joint 4th overall, 1st amongst midfielders. So pretty great.
Tackles: Joint 4th overall again, 2nd behind Kilkenny and level with Billing. Decent.
Dribbles: Joint 7th overall, 5th behind Kilkenny, Christie, Pearson (hilariously) and Billing. Pretty poor for a player of his particular talents if we’re being honest.
Total Passes: 11th overall, 3rd behind Kilkenny and Lerma. Solid enough.
Key Passes: Joint 7th overall again, 6th behind Marcondes, Christie, Cantwell, Billing, and Lerma. Again, quite poor really overall.
Passing Accuracy: 2nd overall and amongst midfielders, behind Kilkenny. Good.
Dispossessed: 5th overall, 3rd amongst midfielders behind Billing and Christie, who play much further up the pitch generally. Not great but not awful either.
Overall: According to Whoscored, Cook was our 13th highest performing player overall in an average aggregation of “measurable stats”. Amongst midfielders, he was our 4th best performing player. **
**you can sneer at using Whoscored metrics if you want to, but for a base-level insight into these things it does it’s job well IMHO.
I’m not going to sit here and tell you that Cook was mediocre, because he wasn’t. I watched him play live and for that last month or two he really was special. But exactly as I expected, his average score for the season is pretty middling, because his first half of the season wasn’t very good and his second half was excellent.
It’s also interesting that he was outperformed across many statistics by players who played nearly twice the amount of games as him. Usually, the smaller the amount you draw an average from, the higher or lower it goes. Again, this was because it was a season of two halves.
Also, I was surprised to see just how many stats Kilkenny was better in; yet he ended up with a lower score. Interesting quirk not sure how that happens but heyho.
It was probably partly because of injury, but my original point was more in response to MB saying that it was funny that people thought he was crap for most of the season. Not MOST of it but…we thought that, because he was. The eye test applies to negativity as well as positivity; Cook dithered on the ball, was dispossessed often, didn’t control games, didn’t help stabilise the defence, and didn’t contribute to attacks. And the stats back it up. No moreso was this evident in the Boreham Wood game, where he was fucking diabolical.
And then he did all these things and he was the absolute TITS and it was a joy to watch
. None of this is meant as a dig, genuinely, I just think you say a lot about Cook without backing it up with anything, so I thought it would be interesting to actually have a look at the stats. And I love Cook and think he’s great; when he’s playing at his best in this league he’ll probably be off to a top half club.