CAN SUN BE STAR?
ROWELL CAN WIN AWARD:
IN an extraordinary season, could NAB AFL Rising Star judges make an extraordinary call and hand Gold Coast’s Matt Rowell the award off just five AFL games?
Chris Cavanagh looks at the cases for and against – and both are strong.
FOR
IF you want to talk about impact in a debut season, no one has had more on games than Matt Rowell.
The No 1 draft pick last year, Rowell slotted in seamlessly at AFL level after making a Round 1 debut.
He logged 19 disposals and four clearances against Port Adelaide in that game, before recording three consecutive best-on-ground performances
– as judged by the coaches.
Round 2 brought 26 disposals and two goals and Rounds 3 and 4 each saw Rowell have 20 disposals and kick two goals.
After Round 4 the Gold Coast Suns star sat second in the AFL Coaches Association’s Champion Player Award with 30 votes, behind Brisbane’s Lachie Neale (31).
Even after Round 16, no other Rising Star candidate had polled a single perfect 10vote game in the coaches’ votes – something Rowell did for three straight weeks.
Last year’s Rising Star winner Sam Walsh polled 26 votes across eight games, his best a six-vote performance.
If you exclude Rowell’s Round 5 match, when he injured his shoulder in the first quarter and played no further part, the midfielder averaged 127 SuperCoach points. Compare that to his peers. Fremantle’s Caleb Serong averaged 81 ranking points from his 14 matches, Gold Coast’s Noah Anderson 77 from 17 matches and Suns forward Izak Rankine 69 from 12 matches. Hawthorn’s Will Day averaged 71 points from 11 matches and St Kilda’s Max King 61 points from 16.
The fact is, no one has come close to Rowell’s average output.
On average SuperCoach points per 100 minutes, Rowell sits at 156 points – above even Brownlow Medal favourite Neale, who is at 140 points per 100 minutes.
Historically, Rowell also rates sky-high. Carlton’s Walsh won the Rising Star award in 2019 having averaged 87 ranking points from 22 games, while Collingwood’s Jaidyn Stephenson won in 2018 with an average of 64 points across 22 games.
There is also another good measure of Rowell’s impact for the Suns. With Rowell, Gold Coast won three of five matches (60 per cent) and without him they finished the season with two wins from 12 games (17 per cent). AGAINST
THE fact is, Rising Star judges have publicly said in the past they like to base their
decisions on a “body of work”.
That criteria was made clear in Round 17, when judges picked Collingwood’s Isaac Quaynor as their weekly nomination, overlooking Adelaide’s Lachlan Sholl, who produced what many believed was a performance worthy of a Rising Star nomination.
It’s been a common theme in recent years that players have to play every game – or close to – to win the Rising
Star award. Walsh and Stephenson played all 22 games in their winning years and Essendon’s Andrew McGrath 21 in 2017.
In fact, the last player to miss more than two games and win was then Sydney midfielder Dan Hannebery, who played 19 games in 2010.
That does not bode well for Rowell.
But it makes it much easier to mount a case for Freman
tle’s Serong or Gold Coast’s Anderson. Taken at No 8 in last year’s national draft, Serong has played 14 of a possible 17 games and has not missed since his Round 4 debut.
He has taken on opponents including Geelong’s Patrick Dangerfield and has averaged 16.9 disposals, 269 metres gained, 3.4 clearances, 2.5 score involvements, 4.1 tackles and 81 SuperCoach points.