When Jacob Weitering and Darcy Moore left the field with shoulder and knee injuries in rounds 11 and 16 respectively, Carlton and then Collingwood people rightly feared that their seasons were kaput.
When Steven May was suspended for his Entrecote antics that led to him being floored by teammate Jake Melksham, the Demons lost both games that May missed, turning a 10-1 season into 10-3. In retrospective, this period can be viewed as the beginning of the red-and-blue unravelling.
Moore is Collingwood’s most indispensable player, Weitering might be Carlton’s and while May ranks behind Clayton Oliver, Christian Petracca and Max Gawn in terms of performance and stature, it is arguable that he would leave even greater hole than the Trinity if he was grounded.
On Sunday night, however, none of May, Moore or Weitering received a single vote from the umpires, an oversight that undermines the credibility of the Brownlow Medal, forever referred to “football’s greatest individual honour”.
The Brownlow has a legitimacy issue that needs redress. It is hardly newsworthy to say that the Brownlow is “a midfielder’s medal” given that has been the case for a quarter-century or so.
But the medal’s continued and egregious failure to value the most valuable players has turned the count into something closer to the Logies or Grammys – a ceremonial occasion, replete with fashion statements and celebrity, in which only half a dozen at most have a prayer of wearing the medal.
The broadcast’s prelude to the count, indeed, was uncannily accurate in projecting who might win the Brownlow, when Seven spoke to the local junior coaches of the six players who would subsequently fill the top six positions in the tally – Patrick Cripps, Lachie Neale, Touk Miller, Andrew Brayshaw, Oliver and Petracca.
Cripps was a more than deserving and impressive medallist, despite the contentious fact that he had won the medal after a two-match suspension was overturned – to the chagrin of the AFL – on appeal after round 21. His sincere, yet modest speech struck all the right notes.
Yet, the Brownlow continues to fail to honour the diverse talents of the best AFL players.
Weitering has polled only three votes in his eight-year career. His young teammate Sam Walsh accumulated 30 in 2021 alone. We know that Walsh will have every chance to take Charlie home, but that Weitering – irrespective of how he performs – will do well to get five or six votes.
Compare the top six in 2022 and the past two decades to the Brownlow count of 30 years ago, when Scott Wynd won the medal, Jason Dunstall was second, Ken Hinkley third, Stewart Loewe fourth, Wayne Carey and Darren Jarman equal fifth: that’s, in order, a ruckman, a full-forward, a running half-back flanker, two centre half-forwards and a midfielder with silky delivery.
Former Fremantle coach and ex-Demon Chris Connolly argues that the AFL has to change the voting system to recognise non-midfielders at either end of the field, such as May and Moore, or key forwards.
The key forwards fared a little better than the backs in 2022, with Jeremy Cameron polling 19 votes and Tom Lynch 14. Cameron’s tally would have been sufficient to win in some past seasons. This year, Cripps polled 29 and vote inflation for the top handful means recent winners have exceeded 30 regularly.
The 2022 Brownlow top three, after a tight count.Credit:The Age
“It’s an embarrassing thing,” Connolly said of the umpires’ snub of key-position players, adding that he didn’t wish “to take anything away from Patrick Cripps”.
Connolly is an advocate for handing the voting over to experts, in the form of coaches, instead of the ever-contentious-yet-unique system of having the umpires cast the votes. He says that if the likes of May and Moore cannot get votes, the voting is distorted in favour of midfielders in those games.
“The coaches have to be involved … and the votes need to be put together on a Tuesday night when the game has been dissected.” The umpires, he said, had too much on their plates to cast votes accurately.
The coaches, though, like the players’ most valuable player award, and every media award, also have a bias towards the midfielders, albeit the coaches placed Jeremy Cameron seventh, Shai Bolton 11th, Lynch 13th and James Sicily 14th.
The game, as Connolly explained, has evolved into one in which the midfielders don’t have direct opponents – they play within a “structure” that includes defensive measures – but the key forwards and defenders have that accountability.
It is noteworthy that player salaries, such as those for Buddy Franklin, Tom Lynch and increasingly tall backs (Moore is Collingwood’s best paid, bar Brodie Grundy), give a fairer reflection of how clubs value players than the medal, the MVP or even club championships. The Brownlow, whether it crowns the best player, isn’t the fairest.
