Voting for awards such as the FIFA World Player of the Year is always interesting due to differing opinions. In the case of the prestigious award, won this season by Manchester United's Cristiano Ronaldo, votes were cast by the captain and coach of each international team on a points basis.

Each voter gets to nominate three players for different point categories; those being five points for best player, three points for second best and one point for third best.

It was interesting to see that Socceroos coach Pim Verbeek and captain Lucas Neill almost saw eye-to-eye by voting for the same three players but in different positions.

Verbeek had Barcelona's Lionel Messi on top from Liverpool's Steven Gerrard and then Ronaldo but the experience of actually playing against these players was easier to pick for skipper Neill who had winner Ronaldo on top from runner-up Messi.

He too went for Gerrard who finished in sixth place overall.

It seems Ronaldo was backed by some of his teammates in Bulgaria captain Dimitar Berbatov and Korea Republic skipper Park Ji-Sung who both had the Red Devils winger on top and had the other two in order whilst former England coach Sven-Goran Eriksson and Vietnam's Portuguese coach Henrique Calisto were among the tacticians to vote correctly for the three placings.