Who’s in Crouch’s team of the year?

FOR ME, it’s Mo. That’s the only way to say it. This week footballers up and down the country have been casting their votes for the PFA awards and my star of the Premier League season is Mohamed Salah.

It’s a long time since the race for this prize has been so close and it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve called it wrong. Kevin De Bruyne could easily win. I’ve played against him twice this season and his first performance, when Manchester City beat us 7-2 last October, was one of the best I’ve ever seen live.

He was magnificent in the first half of the season and has remained consistently brilliant. Had the votes been counted at Christmas, De Bruyne would have been the winner by a landslide but there is something about the time of the year we are asked to choose that makes me think Salah will get it.

What Salah has done over the last three months will be fresh in everyone’s mind. I also think the impact he has had on Liverpool, with the number of goals he has scored, is bigger than the influence De Bruyne, who is surrounded by world- class talents, has had on City.

Honestly, his quantity of goals — and how consistently he has scored them — is ridiculous. I was impressed by the way he started the season but I kept thinking, ‘The barren spell is coming’. Those thoughts quickly changed to, ‘Hang on a minute, there’s no sign of him stopping!’

The night we faced Liverpool at home was the night he really made an impression on me. He came off the bench and scored two goals, the first being a volley that couldn’t have been hit any sweeter. I was standing directly by him and it was going in from the moment it left his foot.

I just can’t get over how clinical Salah has been — he has 15 goals in his last 13 appearances and the longest he has gone without scoring is three matches — and I’m pretty sure plenty of other players will have taken a similar view when completing their forms.

One thing I can say with certainty is Salah and De Bruyne