The Official Barcaforum.com MoM-thread award
La Liga, Rayo, away (5-0)
1.
Cesc (53,4%)
Really finding his mojo. Everything about his game was on point, including his defensive effort, and his attacking was excellent ~ Vapor
2.
Pedro (10,6%)
Pedro was one of the best players of the night. Was relentless on that right flank ~ Bojan
3.
Messi (10,1%)
[...]he was in his auto pilot mode, which means great goals, great passes, but little magic... Good performance... ~ evilhita666
5 Assists and 1 goal, that's the tally for Cesc Fabregas' last two matches. Not bad for someone deemed not worthy of wearing the illustrious blaugrana by a large quantity of die-hard culés. Along with Messi, I think it's safe to say that Fab is the man of the moment! This MotM worthy performance against Rayo takes his tally to 4 top3 appearances in his last 5 outings. His commanding lead of just about 43% (!!) more votes than this weeks number two, is a new
The Official Barcaforum.com MoM-thread award-record, and an improvement of more than 10% over this seasons record (Messi -> Valdes, Osasuna away, LL matchday 2) up until this match.
As mentioned there was a huge leap from the mighty Fabregas to this weekends number two. 10% and a bit more was enough for Pedro to earn his first top3 placement in over 2 months and nine matches played. Curiously enough Pedro didn't have to score to make it to the podium, but an assist and an allround tenacious match earned him his third top3 award of the season. I wonder what will happen to Pedros performance in this thread, if he actually starts scoring again on a regular basis?
A man who IS scoring on a regular basis, to put it mildly, is Leo Messi. Two goals tonight in Madrid, and just a - for his high standards - boring brown bronze-medal to show for it, what gives?! To be fair, it probably wasn't his best performance of the season, by a long stretch, and he had some serious competition from a host of other players in the team, who did admirably well against Rayo.
This weeks shoutout goes out to... the intire defense, including Valdes! For the third time this season VV kept a clean sheet in La Liga, which was as much down to the makeshift defense as a whole as the goalie himself, who was fairly untroubled for majorities of the night. The votes reflected this feat as every single member of the starting defenders plus VV recieved votes from the thankful and probably slight relieved voters of the
The Official Barcaforum.com MoM-thread. Highest scoring member of the defense was Montoya with 7,9%, who with a bit of luck could have snatched third spot from Messi. Let's hope this trend continues while we wait anxiously for Pique and Puyol to return and complement Mascherano in our regular defensive lineup.
Random facts of the round:
- VV, Messi, Pedro and Xavi are the 4 remaining players who have featured in every single match of the season so far. I'm willing to bet my left testicle that this will change after this tuesdays Copa del Rey-tie against Alaves though.
- Jonathan dos Santos made his season debut against Rayo. He didn't play long enough to be in serious contention for any votes, but he was as neat and tidy as you can expect from the mexican midfielder.
- For just the third time this season (RM away in the Supercup and Benfica away in the ChL) Xavi didn't recieve a single vote on the night.
- Busquets got his second highest number of votes of the season... curiously enough playing as CB.
Season graph:
