Inside Adelaide’s club champion night after a 3-14 season and its first ever wooden spoon
Matthew Nicks didn’t hold back in his assessment of Adelaide’s season but the mood on Friday showed it wasn’t the full picture. Reece Homfray goes inside the Crows’ Club Champion night and finds a sense of optimism. Plus, the top 10 and award winners.
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Adelaide coach Matthew Nicks has admitted his first season at West Lakes has been a failure but the sentiment in the room at its club champion night on Friday showed the win/loss record was not the whole picture.
Addressing the club at the Convention Centre, Nicks told a story of the origin of the wooden spoon which was awarded to the student with the lowest mathematics score at Cambridge University, and now to Adelaide for the first time this AFL season.
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“Ultimately we all decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but in what is a win/loss business, 2020 could not be mistaken for anything other than a fail,” Nicks said.
“But failure is a fact of life and it does not need to quell our optimism.”
Strangely for a club that fell to 0-13 then rallied to finish 3-14, there was a sense of optimism or at the very least understanding of where they’re at on their journey in the room.
Mainly because if Nicks’ mantra when he took over as coach really was “prioritising others”, then it could not have been made more evident by those who took to the stage.
“We stand confidently in the knowledge that prioritising others is no hollow catchphrase or meaningless words on our walls,” Nicks said.
“To that end, we know we have good people at our club and it’s to them who I turn after what’s been one hell of a year.”
Nicks had to stop mid-speech and hold back tears as he thanked his wife who has been at home caring for their young family while he’s been at the club, in a quarantine bubble or in Queensland this year.
Captain Rory Sloane thanked his teammates for their fight when at 0-13 they could have “fallen off the cliff” but instead dug in and climbed back up.
Sloane thanked two staff members who had been made redundant after 30 years of service due to the coronavirus crisis and out-going chairman Rob Chapman who he described as the “chairman, protector and godfather of our football club”
AFLW star Courtney Cramey said Chapman’s legacy would be the fact that Adelaide had a women’s team and won the flag in the competition’s inaugural year in 2017.
Sloane also paid tribute to retiring teammate Bryce Gibbs on stage, telling him he had privately modelled his game on the No.1 draft pick and his admiration for him had only grown since he arrived at West Lakes.
“I’ll never forget the first thing you said was you wanted to make the club better, and Gibba over the past year and a half has become the most amazing mentor,” Sloane said.
Andrew McPherson won two awards including the Dr Brian Sando OAM Award for overcoming career-threatening hamstring injuries to play eight senior games, and McPherson thanked the medical and physical conditioning team for their efforts in him.
Ben Keays won the players’ trademark award and thanked the club for taking a chance on him as a delisted player from Brisbane, and Tom Lynch won the Phil Walsh Best Team Man Award which was the players’ way of saying thank-you to him.
In between all that, first-year player Harry Schoenberg stood up to sing happy birthday to Darcy Fogarty as has been his job for teammates all year, and ruckman Reilly O’Brien deservedly won the Malcolm Blight Medal just 37 games into his career.
“I’m honoured and humbled, I never thought I’d play AFL footy let alone win a club champion at such a great footy club, I’m a bit of a battler coming through the rookie draft and it’s great to be able to do this,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien thanked his parents and brothers who made him so competitive, his partner and her family who had helped make Adelaide home
“But the main person who has turned me into the player I am today is Doc Clarke,” O’Brien said.
“Coming over to Adelaide I hadn’t played much ruck so I pretty much learnt everything I know about my ruck craft and AFL footy from Doc, you’ve been a great guy and honest with your feedback, so thank you.”
reece.homfray@news.com.au
Oh, oh, oh, O’Brien! Crows ruck claims top gong
Less than two years after demanding a regular game by stunning the field in a 2km time trial to start pre-season, Adelaide ruckman Reilly O’Brien is now its club champion.
The 25-year-old won a thrilling count at the Convention Centre on Friday when he beat defender-turned-midfielder Rory Laird by just one vote.
O’Brien polled 81 votes to win his first gold jacket as the Malcolm Blight Medallist from 2018 winner Laird on 80 and fellow defender Luke Brown on 76.
The ruckman led the count from Rounds 7-16 before Laird polled 30 votes in a four-game stretch from Rounds 13-17 and looked headed for his second best-and-fairest award.
Trailing by one vote going into the final game against Richmond, O’Brien clinched victory with a best-on-ground performance in the loss to the Tigers by polling seven votes to Laird’s five.
O’Brien had 19 disposals, 29 hit-outs and four contested marks compared to Laird’s 28 touches and three clearances in the Round 18 clash with the Tigers.
Matt Crouch (72 votes) and first-year Brisbane Lions recruit Ben Keays (65 votes) completed the top-five.
O’Brien’s win capped a meteoric rise in the past two years of his career after he was selected in the 2015 rookie draft and spent the first few years of his career toiling away in the shadow of established ruckman Sam Jacobs.
He got a very brief taste of AFL action with two games at the start of the 2016 season but did not play at that level again until 2019 when after a huge pre-season he took Jacobs’ spot in the team and has basically kept it ever since.
The athletic big-man with safe hands has improved his tap-work dramatically this season and signed a two-year contract extension last year while Jacobs took a two-year deal with GWS and has since retired.
O’Brien finished fourth in the competition for contested marks with 33 and fifth for both hit-outs and hit-outs to advantage.
His season was not without drama when in Round 6 he accidentally tweeted the game notes in his phone from a scouting report he’d done on West Coast’s Nic Naitanui in which he labelled the star Eagle “lazy”.
But the pair broke even on game-day and Naitanui later said he took no offence and handed him a new phone post-match as a laugh.
O’Brien has played just 37 games and becomes the second least experienced player to win Adelaide’s club champion award behind Matt Connell who had played 24 games in 1995.
The Crows introduced a new voting system this year with Matthew Nicks and the three line coaches collectively grading each player’s performance on a 0-10 scale each round.
The top 10 was Reilly O’Brien 81; Rory Laird 80; Luke Brown 76; Matt Crouch 72; Ben Keays 65; Brodie Smith 61; Shane McAdam 56; Kyle Hartigan 54; Tom Lynch 53; Rory Sloane 51.
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Originally published as Inside Adelaide’s club champion night after a 3-14 season and its first ever wooden spoon