Another footy season gone.  Another Brownlow and another Grand Final.  They often prompt discussion about who was the ‘best’ player.

I cannot recall anyone setting out criteria for what constitutes the ‘best’ player in a given game or at a given time.  (And I put to one side the addition for the Brownlow of ‘and fairest’ – and what I regard as the primitive rule that you are disqualified automatically if you get suspended.)

I suspect that the simplest criterion of best (on ground) is ‘eye-catching.’  If I am right, that is wrong. 

Football is a team game.  The object of each team is to beat the other.  The ‘best’ player should therefore be the member of the team who contributes most toward the objective of their team’s finishing ahead of the other.  And on a rational assessment, that may not be the player who catches the eye, or figures in the most memorable parts of the game. 

Take some examples.  Footballers like Hart, Ablett, and Carey were known potential Grand Final winners.  Someone who effectively stopped one doing just that may have contributed most to his team’s win even if he did not get one kick.  A winger in rugby may score the only three tries in a winning score, but all he may have done is to finish off the hard or brilliant work of all his team mates, some of whom have contributed far more to the win.  Alternatively, someone like Barassi could turn the game, and deflate the opposition, in just one or two passages of play – and effectively be the match-winner although otherwise quiet all day.  (Think of Shane Warne.  Or Petracca in 2021.)

It is notorious now that some players are much better placed to catch the eye of umpires or critics than others.  There was obviously a choice to be made on Saturday between Ashcroft and Neale, who both deserved an award, but as I saw the game, a Lions’ defender, Starcevic, did not put a foot wrong.  He not only beat a dangerous opponent, and stood like the Rock of Gibraltar, but he delivered the ball upfield with apparent nonchalant composure.  He was a great contributor to the winning of the flag, but he had zero chance of winning his own prize.  (The Lions’ full back may have had a reasonable game – according to the commentary, his opponent got his first kick late in the last quarter.)

We may therefore want to think of the extent to which the ‘best’ means ‘the most valuable.’

There is another flaw in our thinking of this process.  The ‘best’ is most often awarded to someone on the winning side.  There is no reason in logic why this should be so.  It is what is called a non sequitur – the conclusion does not follow from the premises  But it is so hard to escape.  The eighteen Age experts were about evenly split on who would win, and I think the biggest margin was estimated at 17 points – no-one predicted a ten-goal thrashing easing off at the end – but they were unanimous in saying that the best would have to come from the winning side.

That is I think irrational.  As a friend, who played in many premiership wins said, the result is ‘illogical and ridiculous….On that basis,  Bob Skilton couldn’t have won one Brownlow, let alone three’.

And it gets worse when the result is close.  Like last year – less than a goal the difference.  I am not a statistician, but a scoreline difference of less than one goal, say 95 to 100 – last year it was 90 to 86 – is hardly the basis for a finding that one side played better football than the other and deserved to win.  Rather, it is a question of who was standing where on the carousel when the music stopped.  Let us put to one side – as I am told I should – issues of statistical significance, if you rolled the same dice in seven days’ time, anything could happen.  (It is of course a fallacy to hold that if you have thrown five tails in a row, the odds shift in favour of heads for the next throw.  It is a fallacy – but we feel drawn to it by something like gravitational pull.)

But as often as not, we will be offered statistical analysis put forward with a straight face saying why one side played better than the other, and ran out deserving the win.  When the result could just as easily have gone the other way if one out of one hundred kicks had deviated by six inches.  But on we go with charts and graphs and arrows and replays – which establish one fundamental proposition.  And that is that if my aunt had wheels, she would be a bike.

In sport, as in war, there is such a thing as chance.  And we might all bear in mind the observation of His Grace, the Duke of Wellington, that the business of war, and indeed the business of life, is to guess what is on the other side of the hill.

And that is another problem with these analysts and star-gazers.  They are big on showing in black and white how a game unfolded as it did, but not why.  I have read column after column on how the Swans fell so low, but no-one has got close to showing why.  And at the end of it all, they had the look of blank horror and incomprehension of those coming back from the Somme.

Perhaps it is just an essential part of the drama of it all that in sport, as in life, things happen that we simply do not understand.  As Wittgenstein remarked, possibly of a more elevated issue, ‘Whereof you cannot speak,  you must be silent.’