Jose Mourinho is right, Eden Hazard has to win PFA and FWA Player of the Year awards

Yet he had a point when he tetchily suggested this week that the footballer of the year really ought to be chosen from the team that won the title. Otherwise, what exactly are we celebrating here?

Though you wonder what he would say if Chelsea were currently lying second in the Premier League and Eden Hazard was being ignored in the voting because he was not a member of the top side. Hazard is the clear front runner in both the PFA and FWA versions of the award. Not to mention being likely to keep the PFA title of best young player that he won last season.

And rightly so. His performances have been the single most significant reason for Chelsea’s success this season. He has driven them from midfield, offering both goals and assists, a ceaseless, vibrant influence.

His goal against Manchester United last weekend was a perfect summation of his skills: this is player virtually impossible to contain. Even when he you think you have kept him quiet – as United’s Chris Smalling and colleagues did at the Bridge – he will deliver in devastating style. This is a player who redefines the term lurking: Eden Hazard forever lurks, an ever-present danger.

There is something else too about him: he is the most brilliant role model for any youngster watching how the game should be played. When he is kicked he doesn’t flail around or dive or complain. Rather deflating the long-held stereotype about fancy foreign players going to ground at the merest whiff of a challenge, he stays on his feet, projected by the most astonishing balance, aware that this is the best way to inflict damage on an opponent.

He just keeps going. And if felled he doesn’t complain. He gets on with it. If young players were to study Hazard and Hazard alone, the concept of diving and rolling around squealing like a stuck pig after every contact would disappear from our game within a generation

Being a role model is not an essential for the player of the year. Performance is all that matters. If the player who has produced the most in the season is discovered to be over fond of shisha pipes or his best mate’s wife, that should not preclude him from receiving the award. But when there is a coincidence of best player and bloke with the least sullied image, then that can only be good for the game.

Mind, Hazard will be pushed all the way in the voting on both fronts by Harry Kane. While he may not be the player of the year, Tottenham’s young striker unquestionably represents the story of the year. At the start of this season, most observers expected Kane to be projected once again into the strange nether world of the perpetual loanee, dispatched off like Nathaniel Chalobah or Patrick Bamford to prove he can cut it elsewhere without any hint that he might be given opportunity back home.

Instead, as more seasoned forwards failed to deliver, Kane was offered responsibility by Mauricio Pochettino. And how he seized it. From being the first Spurs striker to score 30 goals in a season since Gary Lineker to scoring on his England debut, Kane has been subsequently writing his own Boys’ Own script.

One thing he hasn’t managed to do, however, is help his club win anything. And if it comes to a casting vote, it is success that is the most compelling decision maker. Hazard has already helped his club to a bit of silverware this season (pointedly at the expense of Kane’s Tottenham). And if – sorry when – he adds a Premier League winner’s medal to his burgeoning collection, that should be the deal breaker. Winners should take all.

You just hope, as Hazard cements his influence on the game in this country, we might now be spared Mourinho’s patronising insistence on referring to the player as “The Kid”. In press conferences this has become almost his official title. After Hazard was hacked at repeatedly by Paris St Germain defenders on their way to eliminating Chelsea from the Champions League, Mourinho used the description more than a dozen times.

It sounded as if he was talking about a pupil at his local kindergarten, rather than the most influential footballer in the country. After the season he has just enjoyed, Hazard has proved he is rather more than a naïve, juvenile beginner. Rather than The Kid, the better soubriquet might now be The Master.

And when it comes to voting for the team of the season, no doubt Mourinho would have something to say, but I am not restricting myself solely to players from the champions. So here is my squad:

Starting XI: De Gea; Ivanovic, Alderweireld, Terry, Azpilicueta; Carrick, Fabregas; Hazard, Coutinho, Sanchez; Kane.

Subs: Courtois, Clyne, Fonte, Matic, Cazorla, Aguero, Costa.