Interview: McLean on winning Player of the Season

Kenny, huge congratulations. You’ve been voted the Norwich City Player of the Season. How are you feeling?

“Obviously, I’m really happy with the award and the fact that the fans have voted for me to win it is pretty nice. We had a few candidates, which is good and means it’s been pretty good, especially recently. It’s great, and I appreciate all the support we’ve had, for me personally and for the team throughout the season.”

When you’ve been given something like this by the fans, does that mean something a little bit more?

“I think so, the fans are the heart of the club. They come and pay their hard-earned cash to watch us and hope that we can try and do well for their club. That’s what we’re doing, it’s their club. Players will come and go all the time, they are the one constant of the football club. It’s obviously nice that they appreciate everything I’ve done for the football club this year, and it’s nice they’ve voted me for this.”

What about your personal performances are you most pleased about?

“I think consistency across the board this season for me has been one of my main factors. I know we had that part of the season where we struggled a bit, but I think we came through that quite well. I think off the back of that, we’ve kicked on and that’s where you’ve seen the best of the players that could’ve been sitting here. Gabby would’ve been the main one. Sarge, I’m sure if he didn’t have his injury, he’d have been sitting here ahead of me as well. Jonny Rowe, his injury probably ruled him out of winning young player for the league. There’s been a lot of good performers, I’m happy to be sitting here, but it could’ve definitely been someone else.”

You talked about the difficulties of the season. How pleased were you with the resilience of the squad to turn it around?

“I don’t think you see that too often, the way we’ve turned it around from where we came from. I think if you ask anybody, to sit here with a chance to deliver something special this year, you wouldn’t have believed it to be honest. If you look back at Christmas time, it was a real struggle. I think, within this place, everything we could do was knuckle down and work really hard and that’s what we did. We knew we had the quality here, our performances and the results weren’t good enough. Behind the scenes, we had a lot of conversations. We all knew that we had the right group here, we had the right staff here that could be successful.