Here’s my column from last week’s Leader. It forms part of the paper’s comprehensive pre-match coverage every Friday, featuring interviews, an in-depth look at the opposition and lots of statistical analysis. All content in the column (c) www.leaderlive.co.uk.

Some players go through their entire careers without really drawing too much attention to themselves. Others just can’t help being the centre of attention, whether they want to be or not.

Some players are bland and predictable, and enjoy vanilla-flavoured careers without really rousing fans’ opinions either way. Others are an acquired taste, marmite players that you either fall in love with or you never quite get take to.

Is it fair to say that in both those comparisons Joslain Mayebi falls into the second category? Usually such players are more about their big personalities than their achievements, but that certainly couldn’t be said of Wrexham’s number one. The stats stack up spectacularly well for him.

Last Monday he made his fiftieth appearance for Wrexham, and the figures are remarkably good. In terms of goals conceded per game, he’s the greatest keeper in Wrexham’s history! He’s only let in forty-one goals in those matches, and kept an impressive twenty clean sheets.

To put that achievement into further context, he’s one of only three goalkeepers in the club’s history who have played more than fifty games and conceded fewer than one goal per game.

That really is a remarkable achievement, especially for someone who has divided the fans so dramatically. There’s definitely an air of scepticism amongst some supporters, who point to errors like the one which handed Ebbsfleet an equaliser a fortnight ago or the goal scored past him by Mansfield’s keeper last season and argue that such accidents happen all too often. However, there are also die-hard Mayebi loyalists who leap to his defence as spectacularly as the man himself when he stretches to parry a shot.

He certainly reminded us of his positive attributes at Tamworth, when he helped to cancel out the threat of a direct side by attacking the ball decisively when it was in the air, quite apart from two good saves he made from long range shots.

He certainly has bundles of natural ability and athleticism, we all knew that. He also has remarkable figures to back them up.

So where does that leave Mayebi’s critics? It’s interesting that second in the list is the man he replaced between the sticks, Chris Maxwell. One might argue that what these figures really tell us is that under Dean Saunders and Andy Morrell, Wrexham have fashioned a consistently excellent defence which protects its goalkeepers well.

Maxwell and Mayebi are clearly part of that unit, but they are also the beneficiaries of the excellent organisation in front of them. His most harsh critics might accept the excellence of his statistics but ponder whether they would be truly phenomenal if he could cut out the mistakes.

That would be churlish though. The fact is that we’ve never seen a Wrexham side which concedes goals as rarely as this one does: in fact, no one ever has. He might not have done it all by himself, but Mayebi has been a constant factor in a remarkably effective defensive unit of late.