The real reason for double Everton snub is too embarrassing for Premier League to admit

The most logical reason Everton pair Sean Dyche and Jarrad Branthwaite are not in the running for end-of-season Premier League awards is their achievements are too embarrassing to explain.

Few other managers and players can claim to have surpassed their expectations for this campaign as emphatically as the pair. What both have done over the past nine months has been extraordinary.

But maybe that is part of the problem: It is impossible to explain their success without highlighting the unprecedented challenges laid in their path by none other than the Premier League.

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Everton boss Dyche started this season with a squad that, having endured consecutive seasons in which survival went down to the final week, lost key players in the summer. Attempts to strengthen were done on a shoestring and his options were weaker this year than the previous two.

Yet he has delivered a season that, with one game remaining, has seen Everton earn enough points to be separated from the top half by goal difference alone. The football may not have been perfect, results hit and miss and that four-month spell without a win was hellish. There are legitimate arguments to say that he may not quite deserve the title of Manager of the Year - an accolade Aston Villa boss Unai Emery would be a fitting winner of, for instance. But for him to not be among the five shortlisted is baffling.

Dyche may be a character that divides opinion and who favours pragmatism over style but he has overseen a club at its most vulnerable, with an interim board above him, a struggling takeover causing instability and two points deductions for matters beyond his control. And yet 40 points, which Everton reached with the win over Sheffield United on Saturday, is a bigger tally than they it with better players in each of the past two seasons.

That the Blues have actually achieved a further eight against the crises that have battered the dressing room, is remarkable. Dyche has spent much of this season being a figurehead for the club during a storm of chaos and has still kept things together. There will be people who say that he won Manager of the Month for April and so he has not been snubbed. But it was barely possible for the Premier League to award that to anyone else. That can be sold as a run of great form at a key stage of the campaign - viewed in isolation.

Dyche delivering a season that could have ended in a top-10 finish and which included a landmark Merseyside derby win can not be considered in isolation, though. His inclusion on the shortlist would create friction for a Premier League that has made his job harder by hitting his side with never-before-seen punishments, the first of which, of course, was reduced on appeal. The league's handling of its profit and sustainability prosecutions dramatically undermined the integrity of this season and only strengthened calls for independent regulation. Try explaining that in a nice summary of what the Premier League would like to promote as another successfully-ran season.

Branthwaite is an even more peculiar omission from the Young Player of the Season shortlist. Again, events against Sheffield United added weight to this as he delivered another impressive display to help his side to a 13th clean sheet. He started this season as back-up for Everton and the England Under-21s. He ends it in contention for a starting place in the senior England squad for the Euros and as one of the hottest defensive prospects in world football.

Not only has he cemented himself as a top Premier League centre-back, he has provided big goals in big moments - including a last-minute equaliser against Tottenham Hotspur and in the first Goodison Park derby win in 14 years. He would face worthy competition had he been shortlisted but, again, to not be in contention is remarkable and perhaps best explained by the most significant theme of his storyline being how he maintained his standards of performance in the face of the adversity created by the Premier League.

Maybe that is a story the league does not want to tell.