The Everton left-back is currently the sixth best performing player in the English Premier League this season, the best performing defender and the best performing Englishman.

These are the findings of online fantasy football game www.oulala.com. With it’s diverse scoring matrix of 70 different statistics sourced directly from Opta the fantasy game is able to compare on the field actions on a much broader scale than the usual basic goals, assists and clean sheets. This season alone Baines has assisted 6 goals and assisted a further 19 shots, completed 14 successful crosses and 13 successful dribbles. At the other end of the field he has amassed 31 successful clearances, 18 tackles and 12 interceptions. The positive and negative Opta sourced statistics are then converted into points which are based on years of previous seasonal data. So far in this season’s first ten games Baines has collected a total of 308 points with an average of 30.8 points per game putting him firmly at the top of the tree for defenders in the Premier League.

It could be said that Baines had suffered a dip in form last season from previous campaigns and the stats can back this up. For the thirty Oulala days that Baines appeared he amassed 598 points with an average of 19.93 per match day. He ended the season as the Premier League’s forty-fourth best player and as the league’s twenty-sixth best defender. A massive improvement and surely he’ll be the first name in Roy Hodgson’s England squad announcement on Thursday.

Oulala is a free to play, weekly European fantasy football game offering cool prizes to it’s top three managers every week. Oulala offers unique features such as a diverse scoring matrix and live in-play substitutions making it the closest fantasy football has ever got to reality. To register and play click here https://www.oulala.com/ en/register