Make Eremenko player of the year!

Here's a pub quiz question for you: How many of the last twenty winners of the Scottish footballer of the year award were playing for a club outside the Old Firm?*

You might not know the answer, but you will know it is not a high number. And there's no surprise in that; the Old Firm's monopoly is challenged less often than Rupert Murdoch's. And, in my memory at least, the few non-Rangers/Celtic names to make the shortlist are often defensive minded players - Andy Webster last year, for example (he was on loan at Dundee United for the campaign).

It's not common for a technically gifted, attack-minded player to turn up at a club outside Glasgow, so no wonder Alexei Eremenko has attracted attention. You could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of Kilmarnock fans who had heard of Eremenko before he pitched up at Rugby Park at the end of August on a season's loan; for the record, he is 27, and had previously played for Lecce in Italy and a few Russian clubs, the most recent of which is his parent club Metalist Kharkiv.

Despite being born in the Soviet Union, he moved to Finland at the age of seven and chose to represent the latter; he has nearly fifty caps. One suspects his nationality is a major reason why the Killie boss and fellow Finn, (and also possibly the world's largest teddy bear) Mixu Paatelainen, managed to convince him to move to Scotland. Presumably he also failed to show Eremenko a tourist brochure of Kilmarnock, which makes downtown Tripoli appear almost middle-class - and, at times, less of a warzone.

But Eremenko has flourished; the team is set up with him as a so that everything flows through him in the trequartista position (yes, I know, the phrase "Kilmarnock's trequartista" sounds like an oxymoron) and he has waltzed through the typical SPL midfields that are generally stocked with battling, scrappy midfielders who can't pass wind. In December, Killie stuffed Inverness on our own patch, and with little positive to take from our own performance it was a relief to distract ourselves by purring appreciatively at the way the midfielder cut us open with his vision and movement.

You can tell that everyone else has noticed him; he has been a target for a bit of the rough stuff recently, not least because two red cards for violent conduct show he has a bit of a temper on him. But his misdemeanours are more than cancelled out by his magic.

In American sports, the award of Most Valuable Player is only partly about overall ability, and just as much about which player is "most valuable" and important to his team. Kilmarnock without Eremenko are nothing. If this league had an MVP judged on the criteria above, he would win at a canter. But it appears that the Player of the Year award is not allowed to leave Glasgow, not even for a 40 minute jaunt down the M77, which is a shame.

L.

*The answer, depressingly, is just one: Craig Gordon of Hearts in 2005-06