Ruben Dias would get my vote for the Premier League player of the season

I always made sure to take my PFA Player of the Year voting seriously and if I was still a professional my vote would be for Manchester City's Ruben Dias this season.

You hear of tactical voting these days or players going for the first name that pops into their head, however I always believed it was worthy of more respect.

I never bothered going to the PFA dinner at the end of the season, but I gave it proper thinking time and I would do the same for the team of the year as well as the overall winner.

This year it has to be a City player and there have been purple patches for Ilkay Gundogan and Riyad Mahrez among others, yet for consistently excellent performances look no further than Dias for the player who has made the biggest impact.

City were lacking that defensive leader without Vincent Kompany and Dias has been absolutely top class.

He filled the void, made players around him like John Stones that much better and don't forget he had to hit the ground running having joined from Benfica at the end of September.

There wasn't much fanfare over his signing and the mistake some made is to look down on Portuguese football and Benfica.

Having played for Benfica I can appreciate the pressure is massive - there were three daily sports newspapers in my day and they used to mark you out of seven... that's the daily training sessions I am talking about, not just matches!

I quickly learned that just about every centre-back in Portugal could play out from defence. The lower down the table you went some couldn't defend but they could all play.

Dias does both and being at the heart of a Pep Guardiola defence is not easy. Thankfully, he sets the side up to defend as a team but there are still many occasions when you are asked to play two v two and you are expected to deal with it.

Outside of the City contenders, honourable mentions should go to Bruno Fernandes, who has made such a massive impact for Manchester United, and Harry Kane at Tottenham.

Sometimes it feels a bit boring to always mention Kane for these types of awards but he is just about the perfect professional and there is a very good reason he is virtually always in the reckoning - he deserves it.

Another who I will give a shout-out to is Mason Mount at Chelsea and I think he also deserves the PFA Young Player of the Year award as much as Phil Foden despite the obvious talents of the Stockport Iniesta.

Mount has been just as good as Foden if you go across the whole season and he has done so in tougher times, with Chelsea sacking Frank Lampard midway through the season.

In some respects Mount had to start again - don't forget he was left out of Thomas Tuchel's first team for the draw against Wolves - but he has quickly become as important for the German as he was under the guidance of Lampard.

Scott Minto presents the Racing Post's weekly YouTube football show Different League in association with Betfred

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