AFL Brownlow Medal: 3x winner Ian Stewart says Lachie Neale would be a welcome addition to footy’s greatest club
Lachie Neale will be right in the mix to join arguably footy’s greatest club on Monday night, the 3x Brownlow club. One of the members says, Neale would be a welcome addition.
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It’s one of Australian football’s most exclusive clubs and come Monday night Brisbane co-captain Lachie Neale could become the first player in 53 years to gain admittance.
One hundred years ago this month, the VFL presented its first Brownlow Medal, and only four men in history of the VFL-AFL competition have become triple winners.
Having already won two Brownlows (2020 and 2023), as well as being runner-up and third place on two other occasions, Neale is a chance to become the fifth member to achieve that feat off the back of another superb season, which has seen him ranked third in the betting behind Carlton’s Patrick Cripps and Collingwood’s Nick Daicos.
Ian Stewart, one of the two surviving members of the three Brownlow Medal club, told the Herald Sun this week that Neale would be a welcome and worthy addition.
“To say he (Neale) is most deserving would be an understatement,” Stewart said.
“He has an excellent chance (to win a third Brownlow). I put him in the one, two, three bracket with Cripps and Nick Daicos.
“He has had another very good year. He is a great player and a very good leader too.”
Stewart, 81, was the last player to win a third Brownlow Medal, adding to his 1965 and 1966 honours won at St Kilda with victory in footy’s most prestigious individual accolade in 1971 – in his first season with Richmond.
The others are Fitzroy matinee idol Haydn Bunton Sr. (1931, 1932 and 1935), Essendon royalty Dick Reynolds (1934, 1937 and 1938) and South Melbourne’s tenacious superstar Bob Skilton (1959, 1963 and 1968).
From afar, Stewart has admired the way 31-year-old Neale has gone about his business with the Lions, especially the way he has had to consistently deal with taggers.
“He obviously gets tagged and the fact that he has risen above that is a tremendous complement to what he has been able to achieve,” Stewart said.
“That would be hard. Tagging wasn’t around as much back when I played, so it is a credit to Lachie that he has been able to work his way through the tags and maintain his form.
“I have really enjoyed watching him play. He is an initiator of getting the ball out of the middle of the ground. That’s where the game starts, so he plays a very big role in that.
“He seems to be playing better the older he gets. He is so consistent and his strike rate is very good. He plays well every week.”
If Cripps had not had his 2022 suspension overturned in a contentious appeals board hearing, Neale would have already been a three-time winner, given he finished only one vote behind the Carlton skipper two years ago.
Neale didn’t poll a vote until his first 16 games of AFL football – back when he was playing with Fremantle.
But he has since become one of the consistent Brownlow pollers of all-time, with his completed five seasons at Brisbane already yielding 124 of his 187 career votes.
Incredibly, he ranks sixth in VFL-AFL history for the highest votes per game ratio (0.824) for players who have played a minimum of 50 games.
Bunton, the first man to win three Brownlow Medals, leads that tally with his 119 games producing 122 career votes at 1.025 per game.
Bunton won his first Brownlow Medal in his debut season for Fitzroy in 1931, backing it up with another win in his second season.
He was 24 when he won his third medal in 1935.
There were no Brownlow Medal gala presentation counts and dinners until 1970, with the tallying of the votes done at league headquarters.
Bunton found out he had become the first three-time winner when he was attending a ball at Melbourne Town Hall, and posed for a photo for the Sun News-Pictorial alongside with a few teammates and Fitzroy committee members late that night.
Sadly, 20 years to the month later, Bunton was killed in a car accident, aged only 44.
Reynolds became the youngest winner of the award when he won the Brownlow as a 19-year-old in 1934. He remains the only teenager to win the medal.
He was only 23 when he won his third Brownlow in 1938, finding out that he was a triple winner when he was at his girlfriend (and later wife) Jeanne’s house in Murrumbeena.
When The Sun caught up with him, he modestly said: “Surprised? I’d say I was. I consider myself very lucky. When it is summed up, anyone could have won the Brownlow this year.”
The man who became known as ‘King Richard’, given his lofty status in the game, died in 2002, aged 87.
Skilton’s connection to footy’s highest individual honour led to people joking that he could well have changed his name by deed poll to ‘Triple Brownlow Medallist Bob Skilton’, even though the South Melbourne champion has always been incredibly modest.
Now 85, Skilton has always maintained he would have swapped all three of his Brownlow Medals for the premiership medal that eluded him with the Swans.
He told this reporter in 2023: “I’m very, very lucky (to have won the Brownlows). I couldn’t have had any success without the help I had from the guys around me.”
On the night he won his third Brownlow in 1968, he was lying in bed listening to the medal count on radio, still suffering from a battering he copped in the final round a few days earlier when he copped two black eyes.
He got up out of bed after being declared the winner, had a glass of champagne with his wife Marion, and was whisked into Channel 7’s TV Ringside, looking more like a boxer than the champion footballer that he was.
He ended up donning dark sunglasses to cover up the shiners, saying to Ron Casey that night: “this has surpassed all my expectations … it is beyond imagination.”
Stewart won his third Brownlow in 1971, having crossed from St Kilda to Richmond. That year was only the second time the VFL had staged a presentation count/dinner, which has now morphed into the most glamorous event on the footy calendar over the past half century.
He won the award on the last vote of the night in what was dubbed “a glittering ceremony” at the Chevron Hotel.
“A lot more fuss is made about it (Brownlow Medal night) now, it was far more low key back then,” a modest Stewart recalled.
“The actual result didn’t really resonate with me at the time … I think it grows in significance over time.”
Stewart won’t be at Monday night’s event at Crown Palladium, but he will be watching on and smiling if Neale happens to win a third medal, happy to welcome a new member of the club that never meets but one that will forever sit in footy’s rarefied air.
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