Favourite Player Of All-Time?

Mikel Arteta is my favourite player; he is "Our 'Tater" driving his Everton forwards whenever he sets foot on the field is definitely one of my favourite players of all time.

He is the perfect storm of a player, coming at a time when David Moyes had let Tommy Gravesen go and follow his dreams by signing for Real Madrid. The Dane had just been at the centre of Everton's unlikely charge for fourth place - pulling all the strings with his mad eyes, flailing arms, and sublime feet.

The hole in our midfield was gaping...step up Arteta, a man who would fill Gravesen's shoes...and then some.

'The answer to who is the best Spaniard in the Premier League is now a tricky one to answer'


The very price that Moyes bought Arteta for was ridiculously cheap, for a mere £2m we got a skilful and driven midfielder, with a brilliant pedigree from the youth side at Barcelona and on loan with Paris Saint Germain, who commanded a fee of £6m when he joined Rangers from the Catalan giants in 2002.

Arteta has admitted that by simply training will such cosmic skillsters as Jay-Jay Okocha and Ronaldinho at PSG he learned a lot.

All you have to do is look at the stats, he was the most fouled player in the Premier League last season, notching up 100 fouls against him, a cruel karmic irony that echoed through to this year is the fact that Everton haven't been given a single penalty.

A player so brilliant, bought for so little, led many Evertonians to rub their eyes with disbelief.

So what was the catch?

The magnificent matador joined Everton in 2005, and three years later we still haven't found one. He still astonishes with his trickery, he is still so confounding to most defenders that they have to resort to the dark arts to retrieve the ball from him, and he still compares favourably next to Cesc Fabregas. The answer to who is the best Spaniard in the Premiers League is now a tricky one to answer.

You can also add loyalty to the ever growing list of plus points for the Spaniard. In the summer of 2007 he signed a five-year extension to his contract.

Although he harbours a desire to one day return to Spain, he doesn't let that desire fester inside him, instead he is quite open about it - sometime in the future he will leave for Spain, but for now he is Arteta.

My favourite Arteta moment? Simply whenever he pulls on an Everton shirt, because you can almost guarantee the excitement that will follow --- Arteta..sheer distilled class.