Smells like team spirit as Eden Hazard and Chelsea earn reward

Gooners would have been better advised to park the ‘Boring boring Chelsea chants’ at the Emirates on Sunday – and not only because it might have made the watching George Graham fidget in his seat.

The bigger problem was that the gaffer in the opposing dugout was never going to take the mockery lying down and, sure enough, Jose Mourinho promptly alighted on that rawest of nerves in north London by suggesting that it must be altogether more boring to have to watch your team of supposed title contenders fail to actually win the league in 10 years. Ouch!

But, apart from the most glittering of prizes, there are other, albeit related, measures of success in the Premier League, such as the respect and admiration of one’s peers, which is why the PFA Player and Teams Of The Year always offer something more substantial to ponder than those endless if entertaining pub debates about who is supposedly better than whom.

By common consent, Eden Hazard is the deserving winner of the 2015 Player of the Year gong, the Belgian a one-man rebuttal of the caricature that Chelsea are all steel and no style. In fact, it’s precisely Hazard’s combination of power and panache which has lifted him head and shoulders above the best of the rest this season.

Naturally, Hazard also takes his rightful place in the PFA Team Of The Year, joining no less than five of his colleagues from Stamford Bridge. Again, there can be no serious issue with such a heavy representation from the club which are, after all, champions in waiting – though I would have a quibble with the personnel.

For example, I don’t think Diego Costa should have made it in at the expense of Sergio Aguero, given that the Man City man is still leading the Premier League scoring charts, ahead of, in second place, Harry Kane - who certainly does deserve his place after a sensational breakthrough season – and Costa in third.

And, again, while there can be no persuasive argument against the presence of three Chelsea defenders – John Terry, Gary Cahill and Branislav Ivanovic – plus, an ex-Chelsea man in Southampton’s Ryan Bertrand, in the back four, I think their goalkeeper Thibaut Courtois can feel somewhat aggrieved at not getting the jersey ahead of David de Gea (whose bad day at the office, against Everton on Sunday, came too late to affect his selection in best XI).

As experienced netminder Mark Schwarzer has pointed out: “Coming from La Liga to the Premier League is a huge step and you saw with David de Gea how difficult he found it in his first season. Courtois has taken it in his stride though.”

The single biggest talking point in the 2015 Team Of The Year, however, has been the inclusion of Liverpool’s Philippe Coutinho at the expense, in particular, of Chelsea’s Cesc Fabregas. (Or as my seven-year-old daughter prefers to call him, ‘Cheque Flabbergast’, which I like to think shows a precocious grasp of Premier League finances).

Various stats in relation to assists and pass completion rates and the like have been advanced to make the case for Fabregas but, of course, omitted entirely from this line of argument is the fact that, at Stamford Bridge, the Spaniard is surrounded by a much stronger crop of players. And whereas Fabregas is a shining cog in a well-oiled machine, the increasingly influential Brazilian, by contrast, has managed to blow hot in a team which has all too frequently blown cold.

The PFA Team Of The Year might be a telling snapshot in time – a freeze-frame of a season in the sun – but over the years it can also, like the acquisition of trophies, narrate a story of the rise and fall of empires. Since the introduction of the Premier League in 1992, Manchester United have had the most players, 75, selected, way ahead of Arsenal on 42 and Chelsea on 29. And even when you factor in the lean title years post-Matt Busby and pre-Alex Ferguson, United still dominate from the first PFA Team Of The Year in 1973/74 to the present day, with 94 players nominated – although this time the runners-up are, nostalgically, Liverpool with 66.

How different the picture looks now, David de Gea at least ensuring United of one place in the 2015 team in contrast to last year’s none. Not that their noisy neighbours have any right to crow, because this year it’s the turn of Manchester City – still the reigning champions, less we forget – to register a big fat zero.