Premier Leagues most underrated players

There will always be players who have the 'underrated' tag, some shift it and others will keep the label throughout their career until they become obscure trivia in the stands at ground up and down the country.  Most of these players aren't so much underrated as unfashionable is as much as they are not regularly lauded over on MOTD or in the sports section of the papers week in, week out.  Much of this can be to do with the club the are at, look at the Blackpool team from last season, for the majority of the season pundits and fans alike waxed lyrical about how they played the game in the right way etc. etc....but how many of you can name a starting XI from Blackpool last season?  I'll take this one step further, if Charlie Adam and DJ Campbell were unavailable, who would the starting XI be?

Obviously there are some people out there who will have absolutely no problem with the above brainteaser, and I would be willing to place a sizable amount of money that these people could also have a fair stab at naming the Burnley starting XI from a couple of seasons ago.  Funny isn't it how none of you would struggle if I said name the Chelsea starting XI from last season, or the Man United starting XI...we may struggle a little bit more with Man City, but to be honest most of the time I think Mancini gets his Premier League sticker album out and throws darts at the Man City page to pick his team (FYI - he's got a lot of David Silva, but no Johnson or Tevez and last season Joe Hart hid all his Shay Given stickers).

But I'm going slightly off topic, so lets haul this back to where I started.  The 'underrated' thing has come to my mind having read a number of articles on various websites where 'experts' have given their list of the top 10 underrated players in the Premier League.  Let me tell you now, those lists are rubbish.  To save you all the time of looking yourself the majority of them do agree with players but have players like the following; Park Ji Sung, Jordan Henderson, Matt Jarvis, Chris Samba, Clint Dempsey, Darren Fletcher and Hugo Rodallega...no one rates them do they!? Oh, no wait a minute, they are almost all international players, the combined transfer value of them would be somewhere in the region of £80million and they have all definitely been subjected to Alan Hanson's probing post match analysis.  In fact the only players I did see on the lists who I did have to admit were Stuart Holden, Chu Young Lee and Dickson Etuhu.  Alll three of these guys are obviously immensely talented, but because of the club they play for in the case of the first two, and the role played in the case of Etuhu they genuinely don't get the plaudits they probably deserve.

Holden and Lee are both on the verge, people were starting to sit up and take notice of them both last season, however injury has curtailed that.  Holden in particular is another one of those young American players who could play a pivotal role in the USA continuing their rise on the world footballing stage. 

Lee is an international player granted, but that hasn't stopped people being truly surprised when they see just how good the guy is.  I'm not sure if he and Park suffer from the same snobbery that people think the Asian nations don't produce good footballers, but they can definitely both play a bit.

Etuhu has suffered from not playing at the same time as Claude Makelele, when Makelele was at Chelsea it was oh so fashionable to talk about the unfashionable Claude and the role he did, well Dickson is doing the same role now, only this time no-one seems to care, yet it can't be denied that the guy is a beast and an asset to any team.

So...I suppose its time for me to put my nuts on the block and give list of players I would define as 'underrated'.  In no particular order, my top 10 underrated Premier League players are;

• Stuart Holden
• Chu Young Lee
• Dickson Etuhu
• Ben Watson
• Simon Cox
• Jerome Thomas
• Jason Roberts
• Younes Kaboul
• Lucas
• Emile Heskey (everyone needs to recognise the importance of the Big Man)

There we go, now for the sake of Ying and Yang, I suppose I need to get working on the overrated players...this should be easy...Number 1 - Donkey Graham...