Leaving Pablo Hernandez out of Team of the Season led to memorable performance

Pablo Hernandez has been the stand-out performer in the Championship League this season, quite simply and straightforwardly the best player outside the Premier League. And, it’s well worth adding, better than quite a few within that elite competition.

This much is simple fact, as any Leeds fan, or indeed any clued-up football fan, will tell you. Of course, there are those who can’t, or won’t, see what’s right before their eyes. There are those who have elevated the ability to miss what’s absolutely under their lofty noses to an art form.

Whoever decided the players that make up the Championship’s team of the season have excelled themselves in terms of a failure to see the blindingly obvious. They have managed to deny the undeniable and think the unthinkable. To leave Pablo out of the EFL Team of the Season is, let’s be honest, right up there with leaving John Lennon out of your top four Beatles list.

Doubtless these buffoons had their reasons – and anyway, so I thought to myself when I heard the laughable news that Pablo had been omitted, this is a victimless crime. It’s hardly going to hurt a leathery old pro like Hernandez, so who cares? Let the EFL men in suits wallow in their own purblind stupidity.

In point of fact, though, it may well be that the EFL’s snub might just have galvanised our Spanish wizard into raising his levels beyond even his normal stellar standard. At Elland Road last weekend, against a predictably fired-up Millwall, Pablo dragged Leeds United almost singlehandedly from likely defeat, having trailed the visitors twice, to the unlikeliest of victories against opponents who are always tough to beat. It was the kind of performance you might expect from a man who, knowing he’s a class apart from the rest, and slightly nettled at the failure of those clueless administrators to see and acknowledge this, has rolled up his sleeves and set about proving his superiority beyond all reasonable doubt.

In a way, it’s a bit like your next opponents opening their mouths in the press in the run up to a game, and doing a motivational job for you. Millwall were slightly guilty of this in advance of their trip to Elland Road; things were said, challenges were, perhaps unwisely, laid down. It’s known as giving the team talk for the opposition, and it’s generally reckoned as less than clever. In the end, it doesn’t matter who wins the war of words, as long as the battle on the pitch goes the right way – and it certainly did last Saturday, before a home crowd wound up to fever pitch, as a Pablo-inspired Leeds hit back from behind twice, to secure a precious three points.

Although it takes a team effort to overcome such a stern challenge as that provided by Millwall, Hernandez was definitely the star of the show. It may well be that, after a two week international break where one of the main news stories was an EFL Team of the Season without any sign of Pablo in it, that oversight - that blatant insult, whether calculated or not - is what inspired United’s brilliant playmaker to produce one of his most memorable performances, crowned by two smartly-taken goals.

If so, then let me say something I thought I’d never say: Thank you, Football League. Thank you for your base idiocy, your spectacular lack of judgement, your unbelievable inability to spot a class footballer when his dazzling ability is the stuff of universal acceptance and admiration. You might just have done us the most massive, unintentional favour.