The top 50 players in Scottish football this season (40-31)

Part two in Craig Fowler's list counting down the SPFL's best players from the 2016/17 season.
Celtic goalkeeper Craig Gordon has been in fine form this campaign. Picture: John DevlinCeltic goalkeeper Craig Gordon has been in fine form this campaign. Picture: John Devlin
Celtic goalkeeper Craig Gordon has been in fine form this campaign. Picture: John Devlin

40. Liam Craig (St Johnstone)

Tommy Wright has a terrific knack of polishing rough Scottish football stones into sparkling gems, and Craig is one of many examples. Excellent in his first spell with Saints, it’s fair to say Craig was a big disappointment during his two years at Hibs. After taking a while to find his feet again following the move back to McDiarmid Park last season, this term he’s been able to put it altogether. Fans love him for his up-and-at-them, hard-working style, which fits perfectly in the industrious St Johnstone midfield four; a unit powered by an invisible lever that is easily switched between attack and defence.

Read More
The top 50 players in Scottish football this season (50-41)

39. Anthony Andreu (Dundee United)

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The Frenchman would have placed higher but he didn’t enjoy a particularly productive end to the season after United switched to a 4-4-2, where he was used predominately on the wing. For most of the campaign he excelled as the No.10 and chief playmaker in the team’s 4-2-3-1 formation, basically carrying the Tannadice attack through the opening seven months of the campaign. That shouldn’t be forgotten, even if his playoff performances already have been.

38. Ryan Edwards (Partick Thistle)

Even last season it was patently obvious that Ryan Edwards was one of the fittest players in Scottish football (interpret that in any manner you wish - they’re all true) but he had a bit of the headless-chicken about him. This term, he was able to channel his energy and dynamism into something much more effective. A consistent hard-worker in the Thistle midfield, he’s excellent at driving play forward from deep.

37. Lewis Stevenson (Hibs)

Mr Six-Out-of-Ten took it up a couple of notches this season as Hibs got their hands on the Ladbrokes Championship crown. There still remains question marks over his crossing ability, but there’s no doubting his commitment and tenacity, while he’s also used his years of experience to make himself a more intelligent, and therefore better, full-back. Voted Hibs’ Player of the Year.

36. Danny Swanson (St Johnstone)

A player with ten league goals and ten assists should really be featuring much higher on this list, and Swanson would have done if his form hadn’t dropped off a cliff and remained consistently poor for around four months. It got to the point where Saints fans were becoming visibly annoyed with the player who’d been on fire to start the campaign. It culminated in Swanson and Richard Foster trading blows during a match at Hamilton Accies, with both players being sent off. Whether this acted as a wake-up call to Swanson or not, he was much improved after the clash, finishing the season strongly ahead of his move to boyhood heroes Hibs.

35 Gary Dicker (Kilmarnock)

He struggled a little in the opening couple of months - which is understandable, given he was still getting used to the 47 new faces in the Kilmarnock first-team squad - but since then he’s been the club’s most consistent performer. Surprisingly, his level of performance went up a notch after January when he was required to fill in at centre-back following an injury crisis. As it turns out, Dicker is quite the centre-half. His composure on the football helped start attacks from the back, while he showed the required anticipation and positioning to excel in the unfamiliar role.

34. Tomas Cerny (Partick Thistle)

Here’s a stat for you. Partick Thistle conceded exactly 30 goals with Tomas Cerny between the sticks this season. Without him, Thistle’s army of back-ups also conceded 30 goals. However, the difference in minutes played was quite significant. Cerny totalled 2698 minutes of football; the back-ups tallied 1352 minutes. Tomas Cerny is very important to Partick Thistle.

33. Marcus Haber (Dundee)

This is a really high placing for someone Dundee fans generally don’t perceive to be that great at football. However, the reason he gets such a ranking is because of this statement, which this writer feels completely confident in writing: without Marcus Haber, Dundee would have been relegated from the Ladbrokes Premiership. No play-off final defeat against United (although, how unbelievable would that have been?), just straight up automatic relegation. Manager Paul Hartley assembled a team that he wanted to play passing football and go at opponents with a bit of variety. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t enough talent in the squad to win with such an approach in the top flight. So they brought in Haber. The big striker isn’t great at a lot of things, but he’s a great target man. His ability to hold up the ball is up there with the best in the league. This enabled Dundee to turn themselves into a scrappy bunch of battlers who would defend deep and go long to the big man, with the likes of Mark O’Hara and Craig Wighton feeding off the scraps. His place in the team may have made them one-dimensional, but having one-dimension in the top flight is better than variety in the second tier.

32. Stephen Dobbie (Queen of the South)

The striker netted the same number of league goals as Jason Cummings, who ranks 16 places lower. Why? Because those 19 strikes wouldn’t have come as easy for Queen of the South’s MVP. If you were lining up against the Doonhamers then the gameplan was simple: stop Stephen Dobbie. Unfortunately for opposing teams, in practice it was anything but. The attacker would often act as a one-man wrecking ball, and without him it’s hard to envision Queens not being sucked into the relegation dogfight for the majority of the season. Were it not for a prior affinity with the club, Dobbie would be a top flight striker right now.

31. Craig Gordon (Celtic)

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Gordon is probably being unfairly punished because, for a lot of this domestic season, he’s not had a whole lot to do. For a number of games, he’s simply had the best ticket in the house, watching his team-mates bring fire and destruction down on any godforsaken opponent. He did, though, improve his performance as a sweeper-keeper following the arrival of Dorus de Vries. While Gordon would have been miffed by his brief demotion to the role of No.2, it did bring out the best in him. And his performances in Europe, along with the domestic games where he was actually challenged, showed the stopper to be back to his best following a so-so 2015/16 season by his lofty standards.