There were valiant performances across the Premier League over the weekend. Bournemouth secured what manager Eddie Howe called the biggest result in the club’s history when they beat champions Chelsea 1-0 at Stamford Bridge to heap further misery on Jose Mourinho, while Arsenal overcame Sunderland’s ‘best performance’ under Sam Allardyce to keep their title challenge on track amid their annual injury crisis.
All of this came after Stoke blew Manchester City away as everything Mark Hughes have been building towards peaked in a 2-0 win with the likes of Marko Arnautovic and Xherdan Shaqiri providing sublime performances. All three teams were rewarded with players in the Team of the Week for gameweek 15, but no player could match the individual performance of Riyad Mahrez, who scored his first Premier League hat-trick to send Leicester City back to the top of the table.
Jamie Vardy has been courting all the praise over the last month after he went on a Premier League record run of scoring in 11 consecutive matches, but Foxes manager Claudio Ranieri was right to point out that Mahrez has also been in tremendous form since the start of the season.
In fact, only Neymar (8.78) has gained a higher WhoScored.com rating across Europe’s top five leagues than Mahrez this season (8.33) and no player has been awarded more WhoScored man of the match awards than the Algerian tricky winger (7). Mahrez’s hat-trick against struggling Swansea means he is now playing a decisive part every 70.8 minutes, which no player in the Premier League can claim to better.
The 24-year-old scored his hat-trick with four shots on target and made more dribbles than any of his Leicester teammates on display at the Liberty City stadium (2). Moreover, only Danny Drinkwater (5) made more tackles than Mahrez (3) of those in Leicester blue on Saturday.
For more stats on Riyad Mahrez, click here to visit his WhoScored player page
