1.7 accurate crosses and 2.1 successful dribbles per match: Why Preston North End need to part ways with 28-year-old this summer

Since their promotion back to the Championship in 2015 following a rampant 4-0 Wembley success in the League One play-off final against Swindon Town, Preston North End have been a consistently solid marker in the second tier.

There has been brief times in the last seven years where the Lilywhites have challenged at the top end of the table, and for a short period of time they were rooted to the foot of the Championship as well, but the mid-table area is always where you expect the Lancashire outfit to be.

PNE have some real long-serving players in and around their squad still – Paul Huntington joined in 2012 whilst Alan Browne arrived from Cork City in 2014, with Daniel Johnson signing from Aston Villa a year later.

One individual who followed the PNE way of being picked up on the cheap and was developed into an effective player at a higher level was Tom Barkhuizen, who was plying his trade for Morecambe of League Two in 2016 when North End opportunistically snatched him from the Shrimps in the midst of their financial troubles.

Barkhuizen made the climb up two divisions look like childs play when he arrived in January 2017, and just a couple of months later he was named as the Championship’s Player of the Month for March after scoring five goals in four matches.

Having been an Alex Neil favourite when he arrived to replace Simon Grayson in the summer of 2017, Barkhuizen rarely missed a game in the following years – between August 2017 and May 2021 he featured in 169 Championship matches, scored 27 goals and assisted 15 times.

The 2021-22 season has been different though, simply because the winger has been injured for a large portion of the campaign.

Two months following the first match of the campaign against Hull City