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Umpires are pretty busy in the heat of the footy cauldron.
They don’t have time to study kicking efficiency, or metres gained, or the kick-handball ratio of the 44 players running around at a frenetic pace while also officiating the game to the lofty standards we demand.
What they do see is who emerges from a crunching tackle, who parts the seas at a contest and bursts forward and who the scoreboard says has had more touches than anybody else.
That’s why Rory Laird could win a Brownlow Medal. This year.
It would be the most unlikely of stories. A serviceable small defender who honed his craft to become a rebounder — and one of the best around — then thrust into a new midfield role more for his club’s lack of other options than anything else.
He’s big, he’s assertive, he gets to more contests than most and he wins plenty of them.
By the numbers, Laird has the past three Brownlow medallists covered in the three stat categories that get you in the face of the voting umpires.
The ridiculous numbers Tom Mitchell posted during his 2018 medal-winning year have Laird beat for disposals and total clearances per game, but Laird still has him for tackles.
But none of Lachie Neale, Nat Fyfe and Ollie Wines boast better numbers in any of those key stat areas — except Fyfe and Laird can’t be split for average clearances at 7.6 per game.
He’s the second leading disposal winner in the game this year and is ranked third for average tackles — second with two-game Eagle Jai Culley excluded.
LAIRD AND PAST FOUR BROWNLOW WINNERS (SEASON AVERAGES)
Laird 2022; 33.8 disposals, 7.6 tackles, 7.6 clearances
Wines 2021; 32.4 disposals, 4.4 tackles, 5.9 clearances
Neale 2020; 26.9 disposals, 3.1 tackles, 5.4 clearances (shortened matches)
Fyfe 2019; 29.2 disposals, 4 tackles, 7 clearances
Mitchell 2018; 35.3 disposals, 6.3 tackles, 7.6 clearances
The only people more aware of how well he’s going than those who have him in their fantasy teams, are those that don’t.
His all-time record 20-tackles against Collingwood was a masterpiece in effort, work-rate in physicality, but Saturday’s blistering game against Sydney was pure midfield grunt.
There’s little that’s crafty or even stylish about the way Laird goes about it, it’s a brutal get-the-job-done style and that’s exactly what he does.
With only the help of his tackling mini-me Sam Berry, Laird dragged his team back into their game against the Swans after giving up 50 points by quarter-time.
As part of that run he unleashed a mighty goal from inside the centre square.
The knock on him is how damaging his disposal is, particularly at a club that has cast-aside notorious handball merchant Matt Crouch, but I just can’t see umpires being aware enough of that to not give him votes where he’s had so much of the ball.
So if he’s around the mark on Brownlow night at this point of the season, he’s still got back-to-back games against West Coast and North Melbourne to come, and don’t get sucked into thinking he can’t poll votes in defeats.
He’s had no less than 24 disposals in any game and less than 30 just twice.
The boy who cried high
We all know the tale of the boy who cried wolf.
Moral of the story aside, we’d all also agree (I hope) that ignoring the cries of a young boy in the clutches of a dangerous wild animal is a gross failure of emergency services operations.
Jack Ginnivan is the AFL’s boy who cried wolf.
He unashamedly ducked and weaved and shrugged and steered his way into head-high contact and into the umpires’ bad books in recent weeks.
But the league’s clarification of its interpretation of the rule last week seems like the perfect time to reset the balance and clear Ginnivan’s debts.
They said free-kicks won’t be paid if a player being tackled initiated high-contact. So if Ginnivan initiates high-contact don’t pay it, the same way play on is called for any other player.
But if Ginnivan has his head ripped off by a tackler barrelling towards him. Pay it.
The incident in question is this errant Mason Redman tackle from Sunday afternoon’s thriller against Essendon:
Anyone taking still images of this tackle and circling his bent knee should try and turn a corner with two straight legs. He’s allowed to try and evade a tackle still.
If the Collingwood forward, or anyone for that matter, wants to try and skip out of a tackle by shrugging or ducking, that’s their prerogative.
And if the rule is interpreted like the league said it would, we need to not crucify them for trying to do so.
Luke Shuey made interesting comments earlier this season about learning the shrugging technique from NFL players trying to duck tackles. If that’s how he has developed his craft to try and evade a tackler, good on him, he admits he’ll look silly if he gets it wrong — but what we don’t want is players simply succumbing to the clutches of opponents.
The Magpie army
What was interesting was Ginnivan’s teammates hitting social media to go in to bat for him.
So rarely do we see current and contracted players taking a public stance on divisive football issues such as this.
Mason Cox — who isn’t backwards in coming forwards on Twitter — and Taylor Adams both posted in support of their younger teammate.
Cox said it was “wild” that Ginnivan’s “health” was being endangered by umpires ignoring free kicks. While not a bad sentiment by any means, it would be “wild” to suggest that the umpire in question weighed up the history and the rationale behind the rule before making an adjudication.
Brownlow-winning Magpie Dane Swan replied with a strongly worded message for the AFL.
“It’s a f***ing disgrace Mason and the afl (sic) should be ashamed of themselves,” he posted.
Adams also took to Twitter, saying high contact has “been a free kick for over 100 years”.
Ginnvivan himself made a cheeky social media reference to the incident, changing his Instagram profile picture to a still image of the moment Redman caught him around the neck.
But it appears as if either Ginnivan has thought better of it, or someone at the club has had a stern word, because as of Tuesday, his profile picture is now a butterfly. Whatever floats your boat.
Pap-ing up in the middle
Tom Papley’s standing as one of the game’s best small forwards has held this season.
But watch out for a new trend in his game the Swans are deploying nicely under the radar.
Just quietly, Papley has been to more and more centre bounces for the Swans in the past month. He was at 55 per cent in round 15, 57 per cent in Round 16, 31 per cent in Round 17 and 45 per cent against Fremantle last week.
He missed the first six games of the year and then recorded an average centre bounce attendance percentage of 22.3 in the six weeks between his return and the round 13 bye.
Since the bye, he’s been at an average of 42.8 centre bounces.
In Saturday’s win over Adelaide at home, he had five clearances. That’s the most he’s had in any game since Round 2, 2019.
The Swans midfield is humming right now, but Papley’s injection could just add another string to their already impressive bow heading in to finals.
