Award nominations have been in short supply around Chelsea this season, but thankfully the Premier League have created a brand new one for this season, and Robert Sánchez has earned a nomination for it.
The “Goalkeeper Performance of the Season” recognizes the “the most outstanding individual performance of the season by a goalkeeper” in a single match, as determined by some proprietary metric created by Goalkeeper.com, called “Overall Goalkeeper Value (OGV™)”. It’s TradeMarked, so you know it’s good. But you can’t actually look at the data, so you’ll just have to take their word for it.
In any case, Bob’s performance against Aston Villa back in December was among the six best apparently. Funnily enough, I was at that game and I don’t remember Bob being particularly outstanding, despite his six saves, though maybe that’s just because of the inevitability of Ollie Watkins coming off the bench and scoring against us — twice as it turned out, to consign us to a 2-1 home defeat.
(Incidentally, one of Bob’s two Premier League Save of the Month awards in his career has also come against Villa.)
You can vote for Bob here. I’m not sure why there is a public vote when the shortlist is determined by a metric (why not just give it to the best in the category?), but here we are.
Other nominees for this award include Jordan Pickford, Robin Roefs, Martin Dúbravka, José Sá, and Guglielmo Vicario, who stood on his head repeatedly just to keep Spurs in the game against us at New Three Point Lane back in November.