The winner of the 2014 AFL Brownlow Medal is Matthew Priddis!
Yes, you read that correctly. Didn’t pick it? No, neither did we.
So how exactly did a slow, under-sized, one-sided plonker in a team that didn’t even make the eight end up with the most decorated individual award in all of football? Good question.
One theory is that the umpires are watching a different game to the rest of us, and that would certainly confirm our thinking at various stages during the season.
The other theory is that Priddis had the most consistent 2014 in the AFL competition. He played every game. He won the most possessions. He polled in the most games, and it didn’t seem to matter if West Coast were winning or losing, he was under the umpire’s noses winning the hard ball.
So why didn’t we pick Priddis to win? I don’t think anyone could really predict a Priddis victory and he certainly wasn’t in our calculations at any stage during the season or in the lead up to Brownlow night. After a drift in price prior to the start of the count, Priddis was out to a juicy $64 on Betfair to suggest he was certainly a long shot.
Our trading strategy on the night centred around Ablett, Selwood and Kennedy who we felt were the key players on the evening. We were confident in Selwood, but that confidence quickly evaporated we he unexpectedly underpolled by three votes in the first five rounds. Since things were so tight, that was enough to put Selwood out of the box seat in our minds, however he did trade into $1.60 during the live count, so there was still plenty of opportunity to lay off him.
Once Selwood underpolled, our attention shifted to Ablett and Kennedy. Ablett came into favouritism at once stage during the count, touching a low of $2.55, but there wasn’t a lot of value there considering his potential was clearly capped. On the other hand, Kennedy’s price had drifted out. We decided to make a play on Kennedy at $16 relatively early in the count, as we saw him as the one to beat if things went to plan (they never do!).
We also made an early play on Patrick Dangerfield. He incredibly polled two best on grounds in games where we didn’t have him even getting a vote. The losing game against Melbourne was particularly puzzling. Dangerfield’s price hit $250 on Betfair and that was way overs for a little speculative wager. We knew he was +6 on his expected trend, and he had two BOGs still to come, which took him to 21. With our thinking that 22 would tie Ablett and 23 would probably win it, we just needed Danger to steal a couple of cheeky one voters in the remaining games to be a hope. He was certainly capable of it as a chronic overpoller, and we knew he had played every game of the season.
As it turned out, Danger couldn’t sneak any extra votes, but he did trade in under $30 for those who were wise enough to lay their positions for a nice little profitable trade.
While that was playing out, our predictions for Kennedy, Ablett and Franklin were almost spot on for the entire count. When Ablett missed out on a couple of sneaky one vote chances and was stuck on 22, we were confident that was unlikely to be enough to win.
However Kennedy wasn’t setting the world on fire either, and in fact, his teammate Lance Franklin was more favoured with punters, being backed into $2.54 on Betfair during the evening. Some punters were calling “Buddy” the X-Factor, the unknown of the count. However the thing with Buddy is that when he’s good, he’s very, very good, and when he’s not, he’s not. In our opinion, it’s much easier to evaluate a Buddy game that lands 20 touches and 3 goals, than it is to choose between four midfield drones who all get 27 touches. We had Buddy locked on 22 votes and didn’t feel that he could really win it at any stage.
We also felt that way with the likes of Pendlebury, Heppell, Lewis and Gray. They were all overhyped in the media and it proved that they were a long way off the pace.
Back on Kennedy and a key game in Round 20 saw Kennedy only claim one vote for a 34 possession game, while Ben McGlynn got the 3 votes for 21 touches and 3 goals. We had it the other way round, and that two vote swing was the difference for us from Kennedy getting to 23 votes to pip Ablett and win the medal. Kennedy wasn’t able to get the win, but he did trade in shorter than our $16 so again there were opportunities to lay.
However there was one thing we overlooked – the guy who wears number 11 for the Weagles.
We had Priddis potentially polling in 11 games. Only one three-voter but plenty of sneaky 0.5 and 1.5 vote games. He ended up polling in 13 games with 4 BOGs. Early on, we saw him slowly trending above our expectation, but even when he was +3 or +4 on our counts, we felt he was heading towards about 21 votes which was going to be short of the 22-23 we anticipated would win.
However the signs were there that Priddis was polling a little too well. A key game in Round 10 against Collingwood saw Priddis pick up three votes in a losing team. It’s pretty hard to grab votes from Beams and Pendlebury, especially in a losing team, so that was a key sign that he was going to be a contender.
A key run of consecutive votes between Round 17-20 shot Priddis towards the top of the leaderboard and even then there were opportunities to get on board. There was $13 about after Round 17 and then $6 after Round 18. Once he was on top of the leaderboard, he was into $1.70 but even then smart punters would’ve realised that no one could catch him with so many stars missing in the final rounds. Just to cap it off, Priddis polled another unexpected two votes in the final round to top the counts outright.
Selwood can certainly be considered harshly done by. He only polled two BOGs on the night and when his Round 18 effort of 39 touches and 1 goal was only worthy of a single vote, it was all over for the Geelong champ. Although he had our money when the night began, the signs were against him very early, and as we mentioned in our last Brownlow trading article, you need to be able to adapt on the night and adjust your strategy as things develop. Those who saw the multiple opportunities and trends with Priddis could’ve still made a tidy trading profit on the night.
