After Round 14, this post was titled ‘Can Shaun Higgins win the Brownlow Medal?’.
I had a game-by-game breakdown of his potential vote-getting performances, where he might have been in relation to other favourites and how many more votes history said he’d need to be in the running at the end.
That’s all tossed in the bin now given I don’t have Higgins polling any votes in the last nine matches.
What we have instead is a list of the votes I have for every round in the season and the North Melbourne leaderboard.
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The bolded players in the vote tallies are the ones I’m most confident about for best on ground, and should – should – be locks. The italics are the ones I’m least confident about, with those games having more room for variance. Everything else is somewhere in between.
I’ve attempted to strike a balance between my own opinion and how umpires traditionally look at polling. That means anyone with defensive roles had to do something out of the ordinary to poll, or the game had to have no clear standouts.
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A programming note for the next couple of weeks. Next week there’ll be two posts – a list profile heading into trade period, and then another post about how trade period works on the whole. Yes that description of the latter post is vague, and deliberately so.
The list profile will be towards the start of the week, and the second post towards the end of the week.
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For example, I would argue Ben Jacobs was the most influential player on the field in Round 5 against Hawthorn. He held Tom Mitchell to 19 largely ineffectual touches while picking up 19 of his own plus seven clearances. I’ll be genuinely shocked if he appears in the votes on the night.
Forwards had to kick a bag to be considered. I noticed a trend with Ben Brown last season which I’ll be keeping an eye on tonight.
In 2017 he kicked 4+ goals in a game on seven occasions, and polled votes six times. Two of those matches were losses as well, which normally is a strike against a player.
It’s a midfielders award, so I’ve attempted to reflect that with the tallies. While Higgins likely won’t be near the top come the end of the night, he has a chance to poll one of the highest totals by a Kangaroo this decade.
Highest Individual Tallies Of The Decade
18 – Todd Goldstein (2015)
16 – Andrew Swallow (2011)
15 – Brent Harvey (2014)
14 – Ben Brown (2017)
14 – Andrew Swallow (2013)
Enjoy the night, with any luck something newsworthy happens and for those who are so inclined, I hope your team multis get up.
Bet responsibly.
