Unlucky not unfair: change the Brownlow rules say former winners
Brownlow Medal eligibility should be altered to permit suspended players to win it, according to previous winners Chris Judd and Mark Ricciuto.
The annual discussion has been brought into sharp focus again this week with the suspension of leading medal contender and former Brownlow winner Nat Fyfe for striking Levi Greenwood.
The 2015 winner was runner-up to Matthew Priddis in 2014 when he was also ruled ineligible because of suspension. Last year Patty Dangerfield, another former winner, was also runner-up when ineligible to win the medal.
Judd said the eligibility rules should be altered to permit a suspended player to win.
“I would be comfortable if it did change,” said Judd, who won the medal in 2004 and 2010.
“The suspension is a natural handicap anyway. You can’t poll (in the games you are suspended anyway) so I think it’s a natural handicap.”
Ricciuto argues that a one-match suspension is insufficient to disqualify someone when players can be suspended for a game for being “unlucky not unfair”.
“I have had this view for some time,'' he said. ''I don’t think you should be ruled out for these small misdemeanours. Potentially it should be you have to be suspended for two or three weeks for something, maybe two weeks.
“I don’t think you are an unfair player if you get done for some of the smaller stuff.
“You get a bump slightly wrong and hit the head but because of protecting the head you go fo a week. That doesn’t make you an unfair player.
“Danger got done for a sling tackle, getting a tackle slightly wrong or the player who goes to bump and gets the timing slightly wrong. You are unlucky, you are not unfair.
“You can’t poll votes in those games you are suspended for. That should be enough.”
One suggestion would be to alter the rules to deem anyone guilty of an intentional act ineligible rather than punish someone who has been deemed to have been careless. Carelessness is not a lack of fairness it is a lack of care.
The reasoning for suspended players being ineligible is the award is for fairest-and-best player so a player suspended in a season is not regarded to have been the fairest player in the year.
Players who are suspended in a finals series in the same year, however, are still eligible to win the medal because judging is only on the 22 rounds of a season.
Players who are suspended and thus ineligible are still awarded votes in subsequent games because the AFL considers that voting in any game should be isolated to that game and whether they were the fairest-and-best player in that match.
Chris Grant was denied the Brownlow Medal in 1997 because he had been suspended for a match for an open-handed slap of Hawthorn’s Nick Holland.
In 1996 Corey McKernan finished equal leader with James Hird and Michael Voss but was ineligible to share the medal because he had been suspended for one match for dropping his knees on the back and head of Geelong’s John Barnes.