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Anne Hatchard has capped a brilliant AFLW season, adding another Crows best-and-fairest to her list of accolades. But will she stay at the club? See the leaderboard.
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Adelaide midfielder Anne Hatchard has capped a brilliant season by adding a second best-and-fairest to her growing list of accolades.
Five days after claiming the medal for the standout player in Adelaide’s grand final triumph over Melbourne, Hatchard finished nine votes clear of Ebony Marinoff in the club award count at SkyCity on Thursday night.
Hatchard polled 351 votes, while last year’s winner Marinoff was second with 342.
Little separated the on-ball duo for most of the count before Hatchard’s grand final performance edged her ahead.
The 24-year-old amassed a game-high 26 touches and laid six tackles in last Saturday’s 13-point victory over the Demons at Adelaide Oval.
Hatchard did not miss a match this past season as she averaged 24.5 disposals, 6.9 marks, 3.8 tackles and 10.9 contested possessions.
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Once a former basketballer who did not have the fitness to feature in the midfield, Hatchard took her game to another level in 2022 to stamp herself as one of the competition’s best players.
The triple premiership star was runner-up in the league’s best-and-fairest last week, falling one vote short of Brisbane’s Emily Bates.
She was also named in the All-Australian team for the third time.
Hatchard’s first Crows’ best-and-fairest win was in 2020.
Marinoff maintained her remarkable record of having placed among the first three in the club’s medal count each year since the Crows’ inaugural campaign in 2017.
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Full-back Sarah Allan (314 votes), champion Erin Phillips (277) and defender Chelsea Biddell (260) were the others in the top five.
Key forward Ashleigh Woodland, who booted a league-high 21 majors this year, claimed the club’s goalkicking honour.
Hatchard and Allan shared the Players’ Player Award, as voted on by their teammates.
Allan also received the Best Defensive Player honour for the second time.
The club champion award was voted on by senior coach Matthew Clarke and the Crows’ four line mentors, who graded each player’s performance on a scale of 0-8.
It meant the maximum votes someone could receive for each game was 40.
‘Burn her on a stake’: Gruelling toll of trolls revealed
- Lauren Wood
Tayla Harris has opened up on the gruelling personal impact of trolling and life in the spotlight in a soon-to-be released documentary, revealing “things … kind of fell apart” in recent years.
The Melbourne forward has had the documentary crew in tow for over 12 months, capturing life behind the scenes and the emotion that has come with being a target for vicious abuse in the wake of her famous kick in 2019.
In a trailer released on Tuesday morning, Harris reveals the depths of the attacks that she said she receives “every day”.
“I know what they say. They tell me every day,” she said.
“(That) I’m overrated, overpaid, just some girl who got lucky with a photo.
“But they have no idea who I really am.”
In one clip, Harris is in tears as she recounts the toll.
“I’m human, too,” she said.
“So of course it gets to me sometimes.”
The 24-year-old also opens up on the messages she has received.
“Pull down the statue,” she says, referencing a statue of her kicking style that was erected.
“Burn her on a stake.
“People roasted me for never smiling, and never singing the song. I was like, what do you mean? I’m always smiling. I’m with my best mates, playing footy.”
Her manager, Alex Saundry, is also seen in the trailer revealing that at one stage in recent years “it was just like her world was falling apart”.
Harris, who played at Brisbane and Carlton before shifting to Melbourne at the end of the 2021 season, said in the wake of the incident things changed.
“I thought, if you just try to be kind, people will be kind back to you,” she said.
“The world doesn’t necessarily work that way.”
Things, for various different reasons, kind of fell apart.
“Now every step I took, or every thing I did, was judged.”
The documentary, Kick Like Tayla, will be released on Amazon Prime Video on May 27.
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