By Chris Wright
“Come on buddy, we’re obviously not wanted here”
Last July he was busy winning World Cups with his outstretched little leggy-poos, but skip forward 12 months and Mario Gotze has been voted as one of the Bundesliga’s biggest flops of the season by a jury of his peers.
The survey of 183 players, run annually by Kicker magazine, saw Gotze’s fellow professionals vote him as the second biggest dud of the campaign with the Bayern Munich forward finishing a whisker behind Rafael van der Vaart in the running.
Van der Vaart singularly failed to deliver throughout 2014/15 as Hamburg narrowly avoided being relegated from the Bundesliga for the first time in the club’s history, while Gotze pretty much stagnated among the Bayern ranks despite featuring in all but two games – ending the season with Franz Beckenbauer publicly scalding him and telling him to it was “time to grow up”.
Unsurprisingly, perennial delinquent Kevin-Prince Boateng finished third in the poll, with the Ghanaian international managing to play a full 90 minutes for Schalke on just six occasions before being suspended and prematurely released by the club two weeks before the end of the season due to his lapse attitude.
On an altogether brighter note, Bayer Leverkusen’s 12-goal winger Karim Bellarabi, 25, was voted the Bundesliga’s “one to watch”, just pipping Kevin De Bruyne to the top spot.