The importance of our defensive midfielder?

We've all seen the stats showing how we had a good start to the season, then a massive drop in form between the end of Dec and mid-March, before recovering for the final sprint.

We've also talked at length about how important getting Fabinho back into midfield was for that final run of games.

But I was bored, so decided to see just how much of a difference who was playing in DM for us made to our results in the PL and having quickly played around with the figures, I thought I'd share them.


Initially I split out Fabinho and Hendo, but actually their stats weren't that different (Fab had a slightly higher goals for and average points and Hendo a slightly lower goals against).

I think it's interesting that our goals conceded didn't change regardless of who was our DM (although Fab was the DM for the Villa match, which doesn't help his stats), but the impact on our attack (and therefore the result of the match) is massive.

Can the lack of a seasoned DM have caused that much harm to our players going forward or do we think this is just a coincidence and something else was in play?

*Edited: Someone has pointed out that this might be read as a veiled attack on Gini - that certainly wasn't my intention and I want to be clear that this post was not intended to criticise him for his performance this season, which has been incredible in difficult circumstances. In doing this analysis and posting my thoughts, I was mostly looking for another way to approach thinking about this season.*

*As I mentioned in a reply, my main takeaway from these averages is that we would have been much better off playing Fab and Hendo in midfield, which I think was clear from the final 10 games.*