Congratulations to Jose Goncalves for winning the Midnight Riders Man of the Year award. It was well deserved. Thanks to everyone who voted for the Man of the Match/Year. Here are the final standings for purposes of the award. Standings for 2013 Season Player Points Jose Goncalves 29.3 Kelyn Rowe 26.5 Diego Fagundez 21.0 Lee Nguyen 19.0 Bobby Shuttleworth 13.3 Saer Sene 12.8 Juan Toja 12.0 Juan Agudelo 11.0 Dimitry Imbongo 7.5 Andrew Farrell 5.5 Scott Caldwell 5.0 Matt Reis 4.5 Chad Barrett 4.0 Ryan Guy 3.5 Jerry Bengtson 2.5 Stephen McCarthy 1.5 Kalifa Cisse 1.0
Looks like the top 4 is exactly who it should have been, but a few surprises in there. - Toja in the middle of the pack (and ahead of Agudelo) -Shuttleworth at #5 (lest we forget, before Reis' current streak, he put in a lot of good games for us) - Caldwell and Farrell in single digits (probably victims of attacking player bias)
Agudelo (and Sene) are victims of the number of games they played. And Toja gets "flair points" for adding excitement to the game. It amazes me every year, how the game by game voting ends up picking the right players at the top several spots of the pecking order.
I'm aware that Goncalves is a defender. I think he's had to be exceptional to get the accolades that he has (and he didn't get much over the first half of the season; he was very quietly efficient).
Honestly I think Goncalves was better over the first half than the 2nd half. Part of that is based on my opinion that McCarthy is a much better partner than Soares. Goncalves has come back down to Earth a bit in the last 5 or 6 matches. He's still very much deserving of this honor though.