

Matt Priddis was lucky to win the Brownlow Medal on Monday night. The West Coast midfielder, who received 26 votes, has had a remarkably consistent season, but was far from the best player in the AFL in 2014.

Priddis, a huge outsider at the start of the night, was lucky that Gary Ablett Jr, the early leader of the medal, was injured for the final third of the season. He was lucky that cross-town rival Nat Fyfe, who finished second in the count, was suspended twice during, and was ineligible to win. Priddis was lucky that Joel Selwood didn’t poll as well as the bookies had predicted, and he was lucky that Josh Kennedy and Lance Franklin are team-mates.

Most of all, Priddis is lucky that he’s the best player on a bad-to-mediocre team. The Brownlow Medal is decided by the AFL’s umpires, who vote for the three best players in each game during the home-and-away season. While the system seems simple enough, it rewards the players who win the lion’s share of their team’s votes, even if that team doesn’t perform particularly well for the season. This is how Chris Judd won the medal in 2010, and arguably how Adam Cooney won it in 2008.

Priddis received 26 of West Coast’s 73 votes, around 35%, the second-highest percentage out of the players who finished in the top 10 (Ablett got 38% of Gold Coast’s votes, and was a relative shoo-in to win his third Brownlow until he injured his shoulder). While Sydney team-mates Kennedy and Franklin took votes off each other, and Joel Selwood had to contend with the surprisingly high-polling Steve Johnson, Priddis was able to consistently collect votes despite the fact that the Eagles were the definition of mediocrity this season.

West Coast won only half of their games in 2014 and failed to make the finals. Most damningly, they did not defeat one team that finished in the top-eight. While Priddis polled in five games in which the Eagles lost, an impressive statistic, the majority of his votes came from West Coast wins against inferior opposition.

Furthermore, the AFL’s lopsided fixture, which pits the best teams against each other more frequently, gave West Coast a dream draw in which they faced St Kilda, Melbourne and the Gold Coast twice during the 22-game season, meaning that he had more opportunities to collect votes against the poorer sides than many of his rivals (Priddis collected 8 of his 26 votes in these games).

Priddis is a fine player, who has clearly has the best season of his eight-year career. A consummate hard-ball winner, he was first in the AFL for total disposals in the home-and-away season, second in clearances and third in tackles. But his kicking skills are far from elite, he’s relatively slow, and he averages less than a goal every second game. Most tellingly perhaps, he lacks the match-winning, star quality of an Ablett, or a Fyfe, or a Selwood, all of whom would have been worthy Brownlow medallists.

Even AFL insiders didn’t consider Priddis in the highest echelon of players. While Priddis made the 40-man All-Australian squad, he was cut from the final team of 22, which included nine midfielders (10 if you count Port Adelaide utility Robbie Gray). So according to the All-Australian judging panel – which included the AFL chairman Gillon McLachlan, and past champions like Kevin Bartlett, Cameron Ling and Luke Darcy – Priddis was not even among the best 10 players in his position for 2014. This is the first time since Shane Woewodin in 2000, that a player has won the Brownlow without getting an All-Australian nod.

Historically the Leigh Matthews Trophy – awarded by AFL players to the league’s most valuable player – has given a much less contentious result. Each season, every AFL player is asked to give three, two and one votes for the most valuable player (they can’t vote for their team-mates). 2014’s winner was Nat Fyfe. Gary Ablett, far and away the best player of the modern era, has won it a record five times, but the Brownlow only twice. Interestingly, in the last 20 years there have only been five occasions when a player has won the Brownlow and the Leigh Matthews Trophy in the same year (two of those years were when Ablett won). This seems to show that the Brownlow is way out of kilter with the general perceptions of what stands for a quality in the AFL.

While I don’t want to take anything away from Priddis, who has been one of the most hardworking and consistently underrated players in the competition for quite some time, the voting system needs to be changed, so we can truly decide who is the “best and fairest” in our game.

